daedalus

I have to say in Coventry I have setup four schools myself and other technicians around the City have setup about 7-8 between them. I don't know whether it is because we have an very efficient ISP, but once registered with Micro$oft the CNAME and MX records were created within an hour or so and the who lot (in all cases) was up and running within the day. However, I have to say that even the simplest question to the support department about setting up a demo account for the LA to use for training rattled around for 3-4 weeks with absolutely zip being sorted by the end of it all. I just gave up, I would rather spend time poking pins in my eyes! Mind you, who has a good news story about phoning an ISP for support and getting it sorted within 5 minutes!!

I am not that familiar with version 2, but have you checked the CFG->wwwroot variable in the config.php file, it should be in the root moodle directory. I know if it points to localhost it used to cause problems with 1.9 I usually make sure I have an A record on a DNS server for my moodle server and then just set the variable to point to the DNS name. You can just put the IP address of the server in there if you haven't got a DNS record setup. If you are still having problems there are some entries in the Moodle forums about this very error message. Good luck.

Not too sure why your server would do that. I normally install one of the window managers to make life a little easier. As for installing on Windows, no problem there, it works just fine. I normally install xampp or wamp to get the apache/mysql/php envirnoment. xampp is a little 'open' when it comes to security, and not recommended for a production system unless you secure it a bit.

You have asked three questions there; Should I have an internal or external server? - To my mind if I can get someone else to host, maintain, backup and provide power to a server rather than me doing it that seems the best choice. However, cost is usually a factor in this decision, so if it's free to do it yourself or £1000 a year for someone else to do it the school may have some input. Is it Is it easy to install? - I have just setup a small server for two teachers to experiment on. 500Mhz Celeron, 2G of RAM. It took 30-40 minutes to install CentOS (my personal choice, but you choose yours), about 5 minutes to download and dump the Moodle tar archive into /var/www/html. Set permissions, run web front end to configure Moodle setup a dns entry so the teachers can use a nice name for the server, another 10 minutes or so. Is it easy to design and create content? - To get good quality content is very difficult, I am technical and let the educationalist do this. I just help when they don't know the tecnicalities of how to do it. This area is where nearly every install falls on the floor and dies. It take time and effort to (make that a lot of time and effort) to get any VLE to 'do its job'. Months and years are not un-common from what I have read on this forum! Hope that helps

Good for you! I did the same a few years back after thinking about it for 25 years! I went on to do the Intermediate and Advanced courses, which I can recommend. I wished I could get my old brain around Morse. My Grandfather was a signals officer in the Royal Navy in WWII and as a kid we used to listen to morse on the radio together with him telling me what they were saying to each other! dah-di-dah M0GVW

Just one other note.. If the system decided it is going to update the Administrator app on the client when a user has just logged in to take an exam (which it can do!!) the user must have admin rights or else the update fails and they just sit in a loop!! Or alternatively you can login to every machine (60 desktops and 25 laptops here!) to make sure the update happens ok. Once you get used to its little 'design features' it does work reasonably well, tech support have always been helpful, and the odd funny during an update is quickly cured. It's just a pita when it hjappens as 25 C&G candidates login to take an exam. Good luck

Yup your quite correct, during the client install you need to point it at the shared area for the data files. Good luck.

The "5209: Cannot load SitePreference.DLL" message means that the client app can't connect to the shared area with the exam and candidate data on it. Have you got the ESM server package running somewhere? Where is it puting the downloaded data? In our system we have an "esm_shared_data" share from one of our servers that the clients connect to. The old Promissor app used to complain about not enough disk space, this new jobby throws the error you have reported if this data area cannot be located. We use this package extensively both on site and remotely using laptops. Let me know if you are still stuck. Cheers.

If you mean the exam software for City and Guilds stuff, you can download this from http://www.catglobal.com You will need your prommisor login details to get to it thought. I am not in the office at the moment else I would give you their support number to call. If no one has given you this by the time I get in later this afternoon I will post it here for you. All the best

Maybe this will help, pull up a chair, get a cup of tea and enjoy. Live Education Funding Statement

Radio 4 mentioned that there would be an announcement in the Commons today at 3pm about the future of BSF. Link below is from the BBC website today, but nothing much new there. http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/10490838.stm