Visvanath Ratnaweera

Hi

Your issue "persistent networking issue while setting up Moodle" is a networking issue, right? Moodle is a (web) application, it depends on many things below the ladder, networking is one of them. The whole list of questions that follow are all on how to set up the network on Ubuntu Linux. Have you done that independently (before starting to run a Moodle server)? Some obvious questions like "Network config to persist after reboot" say, you haven't.

You should consult Ubuntu documentation and forums and confirm that the VM has a valid and stable network connection. By that I mean the (old-school) commands like ifconfig, route, host behaving as expected. That in turn means, they should behave as set in config files like /etc/hosts, /etc/network/interfaces (since Ubuntu is a Debian derivative), /etc/hosts.conf, etc. This is not "best practice", it is _the_ practice.

 

Considering the flowery language and the fancy formatting, have you got the help of AI by any chance? The Code of conduct here says, "If you use AI to help write your question or reply, then add a note to your post 'AI used to help write this post'" (in which case, I wouldn't have joined.)

Congrats!

Our cases are similar. We reached almost 3 million question instances. It was during 4.1 LTS. After the site came to a stand-still we too reanimated it by doubling the RAM (of this already beefy server). That was February this year. Since then the patient undergoes regular operations with the aim of reducing weight in general and solving local symptoms, slowness, etc. Too many to count. You can just search for my posts since then in this forum. There is an excellent Advanced search facility here.

The uncertainty is you never know when it explodes again. Our last encounter was 31 October, where a teacher single-handedly generated 400,000 duplicate questions!

There is a difference in our cases though, we will stay with 4.5 LTS (upgraded this summer) and reduce the current almost 600'000 question instances to a reasonable number. For us the stability is more important (what an irony!), so we move from LTS to LTS. The next LTS will be 5.3. If we manage to strip the duplicates early, we might make an exception and upgrade to 5.1, because of its simpler question sharing redesign.

 

Either way, I wouldn't flag the thread "CLOSED". The odyssee continues.

What is the size of the question bank, I mean the total number of question instances under Site administration > Reports? And how powerful is the server? There might be a better chance if you start the upgrade again, this time through https://docs.moodle.org/500/en/Upgrading#Command_line_upgrade.

 

That said, I don't know whether PostgreSQL interface plays a role. It is seldom discussed in these forums.

My question is, "Why Moodle 5.0?" A more attractive Moodle 5 is 5.1. Or, did you hope that the upgrade will also solve issues (massively duplicated questions) you had with 4.x. That is generally a false hope: A broken Moodle will at best remain broken after an upgrade. The reality worse than the best.

You are already in an incompatible environment (very old MySQL and very new PHP). If you can't move forward with MySQL, the temporary solution would be to go back to an older PHP, say 8.1, lot of environments allow that, and delete the additional plug-in you are trying to install.

There are real hacks like editing the environment.xml file to mislead Moodle. I don't know where it hits the next blockade.

Obviously you can't stay there very long, Moodle 4.1 is out of support. The clean path is to upgrade MySQL, always looking at the chart already mentioned.

You say, "it runs without any issue'. Did you run your Moodle through the Quality Assurance (QA) testing process?

 

For me the message in red is clear, I don't know how to make it clearer.

 

If you can't downgrade PHP, upgrading Moodle could be an option. If nothing else, Moodle 4.1.22 from 8 Dec 2025 was its final release.  Moodle 4.5 LTS is the most logical next station.

 

Please consult the chart earlier and also the 4.5 Release notes, then plan https://docs.moodle.org/405/en/Upgrading. Read it carefully, Moodle doesn't know a "downgrade"!

 

Installing and upgrading help is a forum of its own.