Martin Dougiamas

I would like to disable the e-mail confirm (for classroom usage)and automate the confirm.

Yes, with an external database the self-sign-up process could be completely disabled.

Does the Novell export include passwords too?

And are you saying that your other apps have a drop-down selection menu containing ALL student names? (that could be huge!)

My current plan for integrating this stuff into Moodle is as follows:

• Admin selects "external source" for usernames, and the source type (SOAP lookup, database table etc).
  
• When user types in their username and password to log in), Moodle first checks it against the external source.
  
• If the username/password were correct, Moodle creates or updates a local entry in the user table (which in addition to the external username/password contains all the extra Moodle fields like picture, email, etc etc).
  
• If the username didn't exist on the source then any local copy is also wiped and access is denied.
  
• Lastly, if the user attempts to change their username or password then Moodle forwards them to an admin-defined external URL to do it (eg Novell).
  

How does that sound?

Wierd, I never had that problem, but I see what's causing it. I've made the fix - try downloading the archive again.

http://moodle.com/download/moodle-mysql-admin.zip

You may notice on the line where you defined the database type that mysql is the only supported option right now. Technically Moodle can support Access database in normal use, it just doesn't support CREATING the Access database automatically in the beginning. Someone would need to port the file lib/db/mysql.sql to lib/db/access.sql

Did you know that MySQL is completely free?

http://www.mysql.com/

The only directory that needs to have write permissions is the data directory $CFG->dataroot:

http://moodle.com/doc/install.html#data

Cheers!