a kindof blog about moving from ftp only server to cmd line server

a kindof blog about moving from ftp only server to cmd line server

by mandy honeyman -
Number of replies: 6
Hello.
Background:
Secondary school website, PostNuke portal, Moodle and SMF forum all tied together with Cas Nuy's pn modules.

I'm moving the website, for the first time, from a ftp server (i.e. can't use the cmd line and no cpanel) to a server where I have cpanel and cmd line big grin.

I'm reading through the forum about various problems I can foresee and also noticing things which I think may cause problems and thought I would keep this topic as a kind of diary of the process in case it helps anyone in the future trying to do the same/a similar thing.

Firstly, these are some of the topics I have consulted:
Moving to a new server
Move moodle to another server
Help with restoring from a backup (SQL dump)

Unfortunately all of these recommend doing a dump, but that has to be done from the cmd line and so therefore I will try to document the/a solution for only using phpmysqladmin.

I will use different subject headings to identify different issues.

Please do comment/help out.

cheers
Mandy
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In reply to mandy honeyman

Size of moodledata folder

by mandy honeyman -
Need to backup moodledata folder in order to move it across.

I notice (inevitably because it's taking two hours to ftp sad) that it's very very big, total about 272Mb (and this is for a secondary school where we only launched moodle in Sept 04 and very few departments are really using moodle yet).

I have obviously been being overly cautious with my course backup's, doing a 1+1 configuration, i.e. tonight's back-up plus the weekday before's backup.

But surely the only data I really want to move over is the actual data, not the backups.

So I have deleted all the backupfolders within the 98 courses (having made a backup local zip archive first on my pc) and intend to only load the trimmed down moodledata to the new server. I am concerned that there might be a flag in the database that will throw up problems, but I shall suck it and see.

cheers
Mandy



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In reply to mandy honeyman

First steps: which first database or install

by mandy honeyman -
Big question in my mind:

install database first (using mysql source command to load .sql file)
or install moodle first thoughtful

decided to install database first, but am now imagining that that impacts on what I now do about config.php.

i.e. do I need config.php to reflect different directory structure and different database?

Decision made, I'm going to edit and copy over config.php and then follow upgrade instructions, dealing with my theme hacks later.






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In reply to mandy honeyman

edit database to enable direct access to moodle

by mandy honeyman -
Because authentication is handled via postnuke and pnmoodle, during this server move I manually edited the database (mdl_config table, changed db to email) in order to enable direct logging into moodle before continuing upgrade.




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In reply to mandy honeyman

Re: edit database to enable direct access to moodle

by mandy honeyman -
But the change I made didn't work.

What did, finally, work, was changing, in mdl_user table, the authentication field to email. Then, because luckily sendmail was working on the new server, i could request a new password under the email I knew admin used and hey presto I was on.

phew
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In reply to mandy honeyman

Version mismatch

by mandy honeyman -
Version mismatch: lesson can't downgrade 2004102600 -> 2004060401 !

This must thoughtful be because I had been trying out Bernard's lesson module on the other server. So unfortunately the db presumably thinks I'm on his module, and it doesn't match the clean 1.4.3 install.

To rectify, I tried loading his over again and moving old module out of the way, but it made no difference.

Any clues to what to do would be gratefully received.

found the answer in this thread
(go into the version.php file in mod/lesson and changed the date)
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In reply to mandy honeyman

getting users logged in, changing authentication method

by mandy honeyman -
Because I'm having problems moving PostNuke over to new server, I thought I'd see if I could just run testing on Moodle without finishing PN move.

I hoped this would simply involve changing the authentication method from db to email. (NB our students don't necessarily have email accounts).

However I get this error (username edited), but this user name was the user name for the old server, not the new one:

Warning: mysql_pconnect(): Access denied for user: 'xxxx-xxx@localhost' (Using password: YES) in /home/linton/public_html/moodle/lib/adodb/drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 354

black eye

okay, I hadn't changed the authentication database details. So I changed those and the error has gone (even though now trying to use email authentication). Something seems a bit kookie here. - Still can't get user logged in.


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