Hello all - we are running 1.9.5, and have had no problems at all, until the last few days. We have an online teacher who created an "upload a single file" assignment. Her students uploaded their Word documents, and when she opens them they are blank.
I have experienced the same thing logging in as an administrator to the page.
I have created a new, similar assignment on her course, then logged in as a student in the course, and submitted a known good Word file to that assignment.....after changing roles back to a teacher, the file was blank upon opening.
Upon running the same experiment on a different course page....the exact same thing happened, so I'm assuming its something on our server that has been screwed up in the last few days.
Its as if the text and all other formatting has been stripped from the document by uploading it to the Moodle assignment, and then downloading it for viewing.
Can someone point me to the problem here? I don't have access to the server hosting our setup, but if I can get a handle on what is going wrong, I can have the server boys apply the fix.
Jim,
You can check yourself whether the uploaded file is properly stored in the course area. Open the Files (in Administration) and then drill down through moddata/assignment and then the numbers until you find an uploaded file. Check the size that's indicated. It may be that the filename is present but no contents. There are a number of ways in which the file system can fill up on a server quite apart from uploaded files -- /temp may get full with temporary files, /var may fill up with log files -- you see my drift. I've seen problems with server file space where log files have choked the system but then it was impossible to upload anything so I'm not sure that this is a similar problem. It seems that the file name is getting created but the contents are not.
My hunch would be that this problem should affect not just files uploaded by students but also files uploaded by teachers. You might check whether that's the case. At the end of the day I'd advise making friends with your 'server boys' and spend 30 minutes or so rooting around on the Moodle server with them and I reckon they'll soon find the cause.
Mark
You can check yourself whether the uploaded file is properly stored in the course area. Open the Files (in Administration) and then drill down through moddata/assignment and then the numbers until you find an uploaded file. Check the size that's indicated. It may be that the filename is present but no contents. There are a number of ways in which the file system can fill up on a server quite apart from uploaded files -- /temp may get full with temporary files, /var may fill up with log files -- you see my drift. I've seen problems with server file space where log files have choked the system but then it was impossible to upload anything so I'm not sure that this is a similar problem. It seems that the file name is getting created but the contents are not.
My hunch would be that this problem should affect not just files uploaded by students but also files uploaded by teachers. You might check whether that's the case. At the end of the day I'd advise making friends with your 'server boys' and spend 30 minutes or so rooting around on the Moodle server with them and I reckon they'll soon find the cause.
Mark
Mark - thanks for taking the time to respond. The server boys tell us that there is no problem with server space, but have no idea what might have caused this.
This morning (October 1) I woke up and immediately went back into our Moodle setup and tried again to open the problem files that had been uploaded the previous evening....and they opened up with no problems, all content was there.
The same thing happened with all the test files that on the previous evening were blank; this morning, all is well.
How coincidental was it that this happened on a single day, late in the day, on the last day of the month? I'm thinking particularly in terms of the temp file storage and log file storage. Suddenly, as we start a new month.....everything is fine again. Hmmmm.
Thanks again!
Jim Murray
This morning (October 1) I woke up and immediately went back into our Moodle setup and tried again to open the problem files that had been uploaded the previous evening....and they opened up with no problems, all content was there.
The same thing happened with all the test files that on the previous evening were blank; this morning, all is well.
How coincidental was it that this happened on a single day, late in the day, on the last day of the month? I'm thinking particularly in terms of the temp file storage and log file storage. Suddenly, as we start a new month.....everything is fine again. Hmmmm.
Thanks again!
Jim Murray