moodle 1.9 Cannot assign roles

moodle 1.9 Cannot assign roles

by Richard Chambers -
Number of replies: 7

We have lost the ability to assign roles throughout the site.  The headers appear but the lists of users have gone, the rest of the page being blank.  Everything was fine until there was a problem with the server at our hosting company.  We were unable to log into the site and received this error message from the server at the c-drive interface "

Sorry for the inconvenience!

The filesystem mounted at /home/derbyshi on this server is running out of disk space. cPanel operations have been temporarily suspended to prevent something bad from happening. Please ask your system admin to remove any files not in use on that partition.

Our instance of moodle was quickly restored when we contacted the hosting company, but the problem with role assignment mentioned above appeared (I also noticed that the ability to change roles had gone).  We will go back to the hosting company - I could ask them to restore the site to an earlier date, but I am not convinced that would solve the problem if it is an issue with the file structure on the server.

Any help would be gratefully received

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In reply to Richard Chambers

Re: moodle 1.9 Cannot assign roles

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

You're really going to struggle now to find people with experience of Moodle 1.9. 

Who knows what happened when cPanel locked down. I'd go for restoring the site to a known-good backup if I were you. 

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In reply to Howard Miller

Re: moodle 1.9 Cannot assign roles

by Richard Chambers -

Thanks for your really quick reply.

We are in the final stages of rebuilding our site into 2.9 with 365 integration - that is going well.  The old site has been in faultless use for about 10 years and is due to go offline in Easter, so it is quite frustrating.  I think that the issue is something to do with the way that the restored server is configured, so worry that the issue might remain with a good known backup.  We will definitely try that though if we can't establish a dialogue with the hosting company about what might have happened and any changes that they have made to the server environment.

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In reply to Richard Chambers

Re: moodle 1.9 Cannot assign roles

by Ken Task -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers

Questions:

1, was the database on the same physical/virtual server that was shutdown before running out of space?

2. do you have sql dumps of the Moodle database? (hopefully daily)

'spirit of sharing', Ken

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In reply to Richard Chambers

Re: moodle 1.9 Cannot assign roles

by Mark Sharp -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

did the hosting company restore with the same version of PHP and mysql? 1.9 only works on older versions of these.

https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Upgrading_to_Moodle_1.9#Notes

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In reply to Mark Sharp

Re: moodle 1.9 Cannot assign roles

by Richard Chambers -

Thanks Mark and Ken

1, was the database on the same physical/virtual server that was shutdown before running out of space?

Yes

2. do you have sql dumps of the Moodle database? (hopefully daily)

We can do this from the c-panel access to the server

3. did the hosting company restore with the same version of PHP and mysql? 1.9 only works on older versions of these.

I don't konw.  The hosting company worked on the issue during the night.  This morning the moodle site seems to be back to normal functionality.  While the site was offline during the night an error message was displayed that said that there was a database error.

I am pleased that the hosting company have managed to restore the service and have found it extremely useful, in discussions with them,  to have the insight provided by the replies in this forum.

It does seem that moodle was in some way unable to make a call to the database to allocate users.

The hosting service has been a bit shaky recently, after many years of trouble free operation.  Perhaps it is that moodle 1.9 is falling out of common use, so they are less likely to ba able to easily accommodate it as newer version of the supporting software come into use and older versions become redundant.

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In reply to Richard Chambers

Re: moodle 1.9 Cannot assign roles

by Ken Task -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers

Hosting companies, just like anyone else, can have infrastructure/hardware/networking/Database issues.   Support staff might be extremely talented in those areas, but ...

Think it best, if the 1.9 site isn't terribly large, I'd do a full site backup ... archive of code directory, archive of moodledata (this is likely to be the largest), and an SQL dump ... and download those.    Could be used to restore the 1.9 site to a locally hosted version of the site where one could extract bits and pieces of old courses at least.

'spirit of sharing', Ken

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In reply to Ken Task

Re: moodle 1.9 Cannot assign roles

by Richard Chambers -

Thanks Ken

We have followed that advice and made a full backup from the c-panel and also backed up the file structure and the database.  We hope to get it running on a stand alone machine so that we can keep it for  reference purposes once it becomes obsolete when we switch to 2.9 at Easter.  In the meantime it's fingers crossed that it continues to work OK until it is no longer needed.

Thanks again to the people that posted - your replies were very helpful

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