Visvanath Ratnaweera

My guess is that during the unpacking of Moodle source something went wrong.

Each line of the file you mention has the format

$string['keyword'] = "value";

The empty $ suggested a corrupted file.

> First, it means that in order for it to work, someone has to 'love' Moodle in order to get it to work well for the school. Secondly, it is likely that if this is a personal 'crusade' of a teacher, what will happen if the teacher moves on from the school.

This is the first time, I've heard the said argument. It sounds convincing - at least on first impression. Once I started thinking of what really happens, the flaw is obvious.

You don't compare the kicks of a push bicycle with a sports car. The crusaders push their wagons investing raw muscle power, the sports cars run on crude oil, and that costs a bit more!

In German we say "wenn billig, dann dreck billig" (if cheap then dirty cheap). So the problem is not with the crude oil but with those crusaders!

There was a time when we (Linux community) offered local schools IT services like maintainig servers (mostly web or e-mail) _free_, provided that we use Linux. Imagine, we were under pressure to prove customer satisfaction, the school staff always had the trump card in their sleeves, "things should run without we have to think even, otherwise we'll give it to Mac or Win or whatever"

Those times are gone. Opensource have matured. People will use it for its merit!

First of all the figure "21,000 students" is completely inadequate when it comes to dimensioning the server. Read http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=32466 and http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=6920

Are they primary or secondary school children who would just scrap the surface of Moodle or are they technical freaks who need everything and more from the LMS?

21,000 is a big dimension. Like many other fields of engineering these dimensions do not scale linearly. Making 1m long "brige" is one thing, even a 10m culvert is something completely different. A 100m brigde needs a technological breakthrough, and so on.

For a single class, one can run Moodle on any PIII machine and be happy. Scaling upto 21,000 have to cross quite a few barriers, but even now, if your calculations go on Dollar/Student basis, your budget too must be of a different size

And then how are these students distributed, geographically and in usage-hours? What sort of support they need? How about the user management, keeping 21,000 accounts itself could be a bit a full time job.

How about the content? Do you have them already? Do you expect the present teachers to add their content to the LMS? What support they need?

As suggested by other posters, this is a job for professionals. Of course you are welcome to discuss your szenario to be able to make a judgement yourself.

Hello Chardelle, hi Timothy

Thanks for the responses!

From the discussion I gather that "Tests" behave the way I've described. The next question is 'fcourse, is it a bug or a feature

Whatever the outcome, before making any changes to the source, be sure to document how that matrix of 3x6 switches is supposed to control the tests. With and without the new switch suggested by Chardelle.

If there is none, I could give a try it with the information supplied by Timothy.

Sorry that I can not help you with a "step by step install of Moodle on IIS", because I've never use IIS.

On a standard LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) this is quite straightforward, although one has to be very carefull about the details.

In short:
- I will install a fresh LAMP server and wouldn't divert from the versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP.

- rather than running the initialize_db script of MySQL I would replay the recovered mysql directory in the new server. Start mysql daemon, test it through the command line programm mysql to see that
all the passwords are OK, the database moodle is safe, etc.

- now replay the Moodle and moodledata directories into the proper places. Call Moodle from a browser, test and debug.

In "cat in the bag" type of closed propriotary systems, I'll be crippled