Installing and upgrading help

Below are my upgrade steps, they work with or without shell access to your server.

Thank you all!! I'm so happy. The recursive beauty of moodle is that I've learned how to use moodle thanks to other teachers on a site with moodle. Students in my class thank you for helping me. When moodle is going strong 20 years from now it will be no shock.

To all the moodle developers, thanks for the late nights!

joes upgrade steps:
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- backup data directory ( copy to other location )
- backup MYSQL data ( different for each server/ISP )
- upload the new version of moodle in the archive file
put the file in the folder holding next to the moodle folder
- rename moodle to moodle.backup
- ask your ISP to untar or do it if you have permission
ex: tarxvzf moodleverxxxx.tgz
- the decompresson will create a folder called moodle
- copy config.php file from moodle.backup to moodle dir
- mkdir moodle/moodledata
- mkdir moodle/moodledata/cache
- mkdir moodle/moodledata/sessions
- set these three new folders to have permissions of 777

- visit the URL http://yourserver/moodle/admin

copy and paste all success and error messages (optional)
the upgrade works and afterwards you can login! yea.

notes: when i picked an ISP long ago I did not need moodle. If I had known I needed moodle I would have gone with a moodle centric ISP listed on moodle.com. Thanks to tom and bob@thinkingdistance.org who helped me for free.

To upgrade moodle on my ISP (edatarack.com) I used a mac OSX client, the terminal utility, safari, and an FTP tool captainftp.com. It helped to download the new version archive view it locally and delete it when done. Untar locally and use the terminal program to browse the folders and permissions ls - l will let you view file permissions. Captain FTP did not upload the files to my server and maintian file permissions. I don't know if any FTP utility on OSX can do this yet. I'll ask Captain folks next week.
So I asked my ISP to untar the file for me and they did it. They did this as a one time favor. Permissions were done right when they untared it.. the file creators.php in the admin folder has special permissions of 755 where most files are 644.

Thanks again, Joe