General help

I find this issue very frustrating. Support for 1.9.X is ending this summer and there is no simple way to upgrade. The current process is brutal and expensive and time consuming and from my experience little chance of actually working.

I see others on the forums who are having this issue as well. What's the solution?

 

Adam

Gonna stick my lowly neck out here and present yet another thought ... site migration, as you have experienced, is full of pitfalls, so why site migrate?

Why not run parallel sites?  Courses have to end.  When a course ends in the 1.9, it's new version is restored to the 2 (archive kept but the 1.9 no longer for new students, but available for former students [for a while]).  New students in the 2. 

Only doing a course restores then - which will still require some tweaking - but it does an auto-reset because users will not carry over AND one can rid the new course of 'legacy'.  Things to do: assign teacher, setup a repo (if needed), and some 'minor tweaking' (setup enrollments, etc.).  There is little or almost no 'down time'.

Yeah, it's work, and, for a while, lots of Moodle Server administration until all the 1.9 courses are phased out and moved to the 2.

'spirit of sharing', Ken

1.5 Check the database schema (it's on the upgrade page in the docs)

Schema problems in the databases of 1.9 sites that have any kind of age to them are incredibly common. I've seen hundreds of individual problems on some sites. They all have the potential to break the upgrade. Your 1.9 installation needs to be sparkly clean for you to stand a chance.

Your characters sets and collations (in MySQL anyway) all need to be spot-on consistent and correct. Again, if you have done previous migrations or MySQL upgrades/changes they are often not. Should get picked up by a schema check.

Delete what you can. Get rid of unused courses, uses, all those old backup files etc etc. before trying to upgrade. It all lightens the load.

If it does fail, make sure you restore the original site properly. It's easy in the heat of frustration to miss a step. If you are testing the upgrade with a copy make sure it works - again, easy to assume.

Don't skimp on checking your server really is compatible with Moodle 2. "It'll do" might not do.

If you want my $00.02 - don't bother. For sites of a significant size you are probably going to have a hard time getting upgrade to work. I would see Moodle 2 as a different thing and start with a fresh site. Perhaps run in parallel for a while.

Unashamed advert - if it really matters, consider getting a Moodle Partner in. A lot of us have a lot of experience of struggling through these problems. We have the advantage of having done it more than once and we've worked out a lot of the individual issues.

Catalyst IT have indicated that they will keep up basic support for some time. There are still lots of 1.9 sites and I can promise you that many will be around for years to come.

To add my experience...

I manage the Moodle installation for a grad college at the University of Illinois.   We have been using moodle since 2006 (v1.5)... we started using it to support our distance learning program and later expanded it to on-campus classes (as well as research projects and community/intranet functions) as well.

We have something like 3000 active accounts, and 90 active courses in a typical semester.  Our moodle mysql db is around 6GB, and moodle data is around 40GB.   It's not university scale, but it is a significant site.

We migrated from 1.9 to 2.2.3+ a few days ago... (on Monday - Memorial Day holiday in the USA).

It took at least 6 months to plan the upgrade.   I probably did a dozen test migrations during the testing period.

The upgrade bombed out at least a dozen times for various reasons.  Each time I would have to invest a few hours/days of research, trace code, look for out-of-spec data in our database, and come up with some workaround.  Then I'd have to add the workaround to my upgrade plan.   By the end, it was like a rube goldberg machine.

What makes this process extra painful is the data directory migration.   It's one thing to have to reload a 5GB database dump so you can try the upgrade again.    It's another thing to have to restore a 50GB tree of 500,000 files.   The file system migration is genuinely worrisome... on some level I can't believe the moodle devs decided to do it.   I get the benefits for security... but dang that's a crazy thing to do to _every existing moodle site_.   I hope you all are right that the benefits outweigh the change costs.

We actually were hit with one final show stopper on migration day.   I did not realize that Moodle 2 is incompatible with the standard Mysql binlog format.... our testing server had the mysql binary log disabled, so we didn't notice this.    On the production server, Moodle 1.9 ran fine with the standard binlog, but the upgrader died when it executed a statement that Mysql could not store in a standard binary log.   (we had to switch the binlog format to MIXED -  somewhere there is a ticket about this in the tracker.)

You can imagine we cursed like sailors when that issue showed up.

The final upgrade plan was about 60 steps... 20 or so actions to take on the linux command line or mysql console, and 40 things to adjust in the Moodle admistrative screens once the site was running.   Start to finish, it was supposed to take 3 hours, but ended up taking 7 hours because of the binary log configuration issue.

So I guess the moral is, it can be done... but be prepared to do a lot of work to clean up your data, and plan to spend a month or two trying to get test copies of your site to upgrade.

My notes and upgrade plan are in no shape to share... but when I have time I will add them here.

-Garret

So... from all this feedback I'm thinking that in general older/more mature moodle installations (starting pre 1.9) are VERY difficult to upgrade, even people who started with 1.9 and wish to migrate and/or upgrade to moodle 2.x must really be very careful to do it right.  Most people recommend starting fresh, if that is an option.

I'm hoping the upgrade/migration process/robustness will improve yet.  Does anybody have any idea if this will happen - are improvements like this in the works anywhere?

Kind regards,
 - Leo