General help

Mahipal - Welcome to the Moodle community! As you will likely discover, the more information you can provide the more other folks can help. Typically, it helps to know the OS (WinXP Home in your case), the web server and version (Apache 2.0?), the database server (MySQL 5.0?), and the version of PHP (5.2?) that you are using. I am assuming that you are running Apache on your WinXP server.

It sounds like you can accomplish what you want by configuring the apache web server for a virtual host. I initially setup our production server on a WIMP server (Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP) and vaguely remember how I did it. Under Windows, the computer name is associated with the IP so that you can use its name as a way of locally calling the machine. It sounds like you made the Moodle directory your root directory which is a good approach if that web server is dedicated to serving Moodle pages. On my office desktop, I run a test server that I encourage other staff to use for testing new features. The computer name is Borrow and I do not make the document root the first instances path. Instead I create a folder called web and put the first instance of moodle as a subfolder of web so that each instance has its own folder. That allows me to simply call http://borrow/moodle/ but you could do the same thing. If your computer name is Mahipal and you put one instance in a folder called Instance1 and another in Instance2 you could call http://Mahipal/Instance1 or http://Mahipal/Instance2. Note that this will only work inside your LAN. You would need to configure your router in order to allow outside traffic to your website and register a domain name.

Since I like to do some testing I typically have various versions of Moodle installed (which is similar to what you are calling an instance). One thing you can do is simply put one instance in one directory and another instance in another. In that case I would call http://borrow/moodle16 or http://borrow/moodle17 for the second instance. I'm not sure about the details of setting up a virtual host in Apache but if you look in the documentation it should become fairly obvious. The more specific you can be about what you would like to accomplish the more likely someone will be able to provide a set of step by step instructions to accomplish it. I have been very impressed by the generosity and responsiveness of the members of the Moodle community. I hope that this helps get your started. Best of luck and Happy Moodilng!

Hi Mahipal

From Anthony's detailed answer you can see that there are many ways of doing what you want. I just want to highlight the simpletest way:

- copy Moodle-files to directories like moodle1/, moodle2/, etc.

- create different databases, say moodle1, moodle2, with corresponding user(s)

- create different Moodle-data directories, say moodledata1/, moodledata2/, ...

- point a browser to http://your.ip/moodle1 to get the first instance configured, then go to httpd://your.ip/moodle2 etc.

One advice though: This is perfect for testing and evaluation. But once it comes to running a production server, you cant beat LAMP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_%28software_bundle%29 whether in terms of saved licence fees, aquired server and netwoking know-how in your staff, or above all, in terms of the support you get free-of-charge in this site!

May be one day one you won't be able to run a production server on Linux. But it is an investment well worth trying. Changing to Linux is even considered an "upgrade" in this forum: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=50840 !

I have done some work in your part of the world (in fact, it is not far from where I come from) and hope to come back soon with a new idea.