poltawski

Hi happymeal, Your Moodle site is made up of a) the database b) the 'moodledata' files and c) the moodle code including custom modules and themes. I'd be a little bit cautious if you want to take this on without prior experience of moving or maintain a Moodle as it does require some work to ensure its kept secure and up to date. So please do conduct a test migration and make sure you are able to stay on top of it! It terms of getting the data from CLEO, we have migrated a number of schools over to LUNS hosting. They have been making a charge to schools to get this data, so you will want to be aware of this - and I suggest to request a breakdown of the charges to ensure you are happy with what they are charging for (in my personal view charging schools to get access to their own data is unjustifiable and lamentable).

Don't want to get on the wrong side of the forum rules here, but couldn't pass by this thread without saying thanks for the kind words from you guys about LUNS on this thread - you've made our day See you at the edugeek conference ;-) Dan Poltawski LUNS

Hi, This problem should be resolved now, it was affecting Cumbria Schools who use the Cumbria mail relay service. We were asked by LCC to put some additional security restrictions between servers in the Cumbria ISP Services (which currently will continue to be managed by LUNS) and CLEO schools, unfortunately we missed off mail relay from the ACLs causing this outage. We've resolved that issue and mail should start flowing through to your school email servers. Very sorry about that! cheers, Dan Poltawski LUNS ps. CLEO support doesn't transfer to LCC till tomorrow night technically ;-)

Hi, Latest we've heard from LCC is that there have been serious air conditioning problems at Preston County Hall and a number of servers had to be powered down to control the temperature. This problem is currently affecting schools DNS causing CLEO services like Moodle to be unavailable when using school domain names. If you know how to manipulate a hosts file a 'bodge' way of gaining access to your moodle in the meantime is to setup an entry to 194.66.222.132. Dan Poltawski LUNS

Good criticism, I agree and it was entirely my fault for not ensuring that this happened with the upgrade notifications. Actually secretlife, I think that was posted after the upgrade had happened (or while in process) and not before. You could switch on the password policy to prevent that. Obviously i'd like to see that go hand in hand with user education about using strong passwords. An unenviable task, but i'd rather see that than student details being compromised or a schools' reputation being discredited due to adult related spam.... Better for you, but certainly not all schools. If I were a school tech I expect i'd like to run my own moodle system and have control much like you - as i've got the skills to do it. But that might not be the best thing for my school long term (what happens when I leave, can I train and support it, do I have the funds to find the infrastructure to ensure it works all the time?). In CLEO we're not perfect (who is?), but I personally believe passionately that we offer a good service which makes efficient use of taxpayer funding. Instead of spending a load of money on licensing costs, money has been used to fund: Massive training programmes for teachers and staff (and whats the point of having it if the teachers dont use it) Massive investment into hardware and infrastructure to ensure its highly available Support structures to ensure we find and fix faults, you can call someone if it breaks We've also been able to make significant contributions to the Moodle project which benefit all schools around the world and made customisations for schools to make it fit more for the environment. Hopefully this will continue to a greater and greater extent as the years go by. We are able to do this as we have dedicated expertise due to the scale of the CLEO offering. This also helps us be able to influence the direction of Moodle. (sorry, i'll stop selling it now - I truly do believe in it which is why I enjoy working on the project).

Hi, Only administrators are being forced to do this, this is a precautionary measure introduced by Moodle core in Moodle 1.9.7. See Moodle release notes. Please note that we did not take the decision to leave this password change step in the upgrade lightly and decided to keep it in the Moodle upgrade for CLEO to ensure that administrators passwords are forced to be salted. We implemented password salting in the CLEO moodle instance some time ago, but recently there have been a number of public discussions of how to take an unsalted password hash and use a lookup table to reverse this. It seemed prudent that we take our best efforts to ensure old adminsitrator accounts in CLEO had their passwords salted to avoid this being exploited. We disabled this part of the CLEO upgrade as the cost of applying this across all 230,000 users in CLEO did not seem to outweigh the benefits, though we would still strongly recommend that Moodle administrators choose to turn this option on we felt it better to leave this up schools. cheers, Dan Poltawski (CLEO Moodle Tech Lead) Ps. you might be interested in the official CLEO Moodle User Group http://vle.cleo.net.uk - you can get acccess by contacting the CLEO Office.

Hi, We had a failure with our internal file server which caused the problem. Unfortunately our monitoring system failed to send sms notifications to alert us of the problem so we only noticed and rectified the problem at approx 1pm. Sorry about that - hope we didn't spoil your sunday too much by fixing it :-P Dan Poltawski LUNS Ltd

PS. I work in the systems side - I think we should all spare a though for those responsible for networks- they only ever get blamed when things go wrong [i'm sure some of you are familiar with this ]

Hi Simon, It certainly did, its great to hear the preparation my colleagues put into the network engineering results in a desirable experience for you guys on the ground! This is afterall what we try and work day in and day out trying to do Dan (LUNS)

Nope, but we do use an unusual theme setup. I have a feeling it might be to do with incorrect theme variables, (which I fixed in CVS last week, amazingly!). I am going out now but will have a look later.

Hi All, please excuse this brief thread take-over. As a point of discolsure i'm a developer at LUNS ltd and responsible for the CLEO Moodle Service, hope you don't mind me responding: @simplesi Please please please! tell CLEO what is unintuitive! I am a Moodle Developer and I also work for CLEO, and I really want to help with making things better! If you find a problem, report it! Either via the moodle tracker or via CLEO, or perhaps even informally via the CLEO moodle (vle.cleo.net.uk). Hopefully things will eventually improve with good suggestions, its certainly a focus of new moodle versions. But it wont happen overnight. With regards to themes, you can have as much customisation as you'd like, we (CLEO) do not restrict you, other than ensuring your themes are valid and sustainable. (e.g. we disallow if themes are doing database queries.. which isn't something a theme should be doing as its not style!) I hope nobody tells you otherwise, you do have as much control as you'd like about theme and that was the aim from the start. @dezt We (CLEO) try to not restrict anything unnecessarily. To date we've only ever disabled one feature in moodle core, that is Moodle Networking. The reason for this was because we didn't wish schools to use this without not know what they were doing and our support orgs not understanding either. You can request this to be enabled by contacting your local support org (although we'd prefer you'd know what you are doing). Custom modules are a major problem as we need to ensure they work across all 450+ moodles we currently host. This does mean we need to make sacrifices. If we enable a module it needs to working more or less 'forever'! As MGE suggests, this can cause problems if the module is not perfect. We make the sacrifice of the latest new module in return for reliability in CLEO. @secretlife CLEO is not on holiday and available all through the holiday period! From what I can see that moodle looks to be working OK to me at the moment. Please report all issues imediately to your local support centre we are interested in providing 24/7 access. Issues *will* be looked at, but often issues are not reported. Please make sure you report problems! (But please also note there are lots of other issues which may cause your moodle unavailable (e.g. my isp is currently ridiculously slow)!). @mighty.grey.eagle Deary me, I took Christmas Day off, you should too All CLEO moodles are now using 1.8 For the (off the) record, I hope we will be looking at moving to 1.9 at the easter holidays. There is still a significant amount of work going into 1.9 bugfixing, and i'm trying to get as involved in this as I can to ensure a smooth upgrade path for CLEO schools. (For example, recently there was a big change in the admin tree to include all admin pages in search and other such things. I have been trying to test these things thoroughly MDL-11561 )