Howard Miller

In case you don't read any further... make sure you take full backups of Moodle before you touch anything.

I would strongly recommend migrating to a new server. Release-upgrade will almost certainly work in that it'll upgrade Ubuntu. The most likely outcome, however, is that it will trash your database. Not the end of the world (if you have a backup) but a hassle.

I just like the idea of knowing that I have a completely clean server and then re-installing my Moodle data. If we're talking Ubuntu Server then always go with the LTS. I think that's currently 22.04

 

BUT... you also need to consider what Visvanath is saying above ^^

It is - but the conclusion must be that there was something wrong with your 8.1 installation.

I'm not especially familiar with the Tiles format but I recall that the very similar Grid format had the same limitation. The user actually had to click the tile/grid to fire the javascript which opened the topic section. Supplying the link to the section did not open the section. I'm guessing that this is probably because it's hard to do - that must be bypassing the course format code.

Anyway, my point is that this is (almost certainly) a limitation of the course format you are using rather than core Moodle. I would definitely make sure you have the latest version of Tiles (in case this is sorted) and, if it isn't, look for or make a report in their bug tracker.

https://bitbucket.org/dw8/moodle-format_tiles/issues

Depends what you mean by upgrade... are you just doing regular patching (which should be ok) or going to a new version of Ubuntu?

If the latter, I would assume "no". While you might get away with it, what is more likely is that a database version update (or similar) will kill everything.

My policy for Ubuntu server is to use LTS versions and take the opportunity to rebuild the server when jumping to the next LTS. Safer.

Remember, if in doubt, make sure you have a full backup of Moodle.

You're probably looking at the adhoc tasks table - if the emails have been queued but not sent.