Moodle

[ticker]

Any one else been having fun with moodle last week and this week.

[witch]

Fun...

FUN????

 

Can't even get the B*&****%$ thing working!

[ticker]

Ours come through the LEA. so i dont have to worry about set up.

[secretlife]

Did you get the CLEO message regarding this? It was on their moodle - tonight between 10 and midnight they are replacing some switches (as you do)

Over the past few weeks many of you have been reporting issues with moodle performance. We understand how crucial the performance of moodle is for many schools and have been working hard to get to the bottom of the problem.

 

I'm sorry that we've been quite engrossed in finding a fix and probably not communicated the work we are doing as well as we should. I hope this post will be of some assurance to you that we are trying our best to get to the bottom of the problem.

 

There are a large number of devices which are involved with keeping moodle running for CLEO schools, and trying to discover what is causing this issue involves painstaking trawling through logs on many devices and servers looking for a correlation between reported slowness and activity which is going on. Most of the usual indicators of problems such as high server load are not an issue. Frustratingly, the extensive amount of equipment we have in place to prevent load problems makes the issue harder to identify.

 

At this time our best analysis on the cause of the problems are focused on problems with the internal network hardware within our server farms. This network handles communication between the various servers involved with loading your moodle site.

 

We have made a series of changes over the past week to try and eliminate the problem, including:

 

* Replacement of network switch hardware on tuesday

* Upgrading the firmware on all our server farm switches on friday.

 

We believe that the network switches may be reaching their capacity, our next move is likely to be an overnight replacement of all switches to higher grade replacements.

 

It is not certain that this will fix the issue, so please continue to report issues experienced to local support desks. Getting good information of times when problems occur is invaluable to us.

 

Dan

Update - it has now been decided to replace all the switches Dan mentions, at 10pm tonight. This means that the CLEO Moodle service will be unavailable from 10pm for about 2 hours (ish) whilst this work is carried out. We hope this will fix the issues you have been experiencing but please do not hesitate to contact you LA helpdesk tomorrow if you are still experiencing problems.

 

CLEO apologize for these issues and problems and your detailed reports of errors have been invalauble so thank you.

 

Alison