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Virtual machines, real users

Posted on 18 Jun 2009 at 11:06

Jon Honeyball keeps up with virtualisation and calls for greener servers, while David Moss continues setting up a course management system.

With all those elements now in place I can turn my attention to the setup of Moodle itself, and as with any complex operation like this, it's best to break it down into a series of simple steps that you can tick off as you go along. I'm a strong advocate of this approach, so I'm going to start by reprinting the list I created at the very beginning of the project, then walk through the various stages that I'm covering this month in more detail (steps 9-18) - unless I've already covered them in previous issues, in which case I'll simply point you to the relevant issue.

Here are the complete setup steps for Moodle:

1. Install Internet Information Services (IIS) 7 on Windows Server 2008 along with the CGI and FastCGI services.

2. Download and install PHP and modify the php.ini file.

3. Integrate PHP with IIS.

4. Download and install MySQL Server 5.1.

5. Modify the php.ini file to accommodate MySQL 5.1.

6. Download and install MySQL Administrator, create a practice Schema (database), add users and so on.

7. Download and configure PHPMyAdmin.

8. Add a new document type to IIS 7.

9. Create a new schema for Moodle in MySQL Server 5.1.

10. Create a new Moodle administration user account in MySQL Server 5.1.

11. Modify the MySQL my.ini file.

12. Create a data directory for Moodle.

13. Configure permissions for the data directory.

14. Download Moodle.

15. Extract Moodle to a folder.

16. Configure PHP to work with Moodle.

17. Configure IIS for Moodle.

18. Configure the Moodle config.php file.

I began this month's work by creating a schema for Moodle and setting up an admin account to manage this new Moodle schema. You could do all this using the root account of course, but none of us have ever done anything as naughty as that.

The next thing you need to do is edit the MySQL Server my.ini file by turning off its Strict Mode setting. To do that, locate my.ini file - which will be in the MySQL Server 5.1 folder if you ran with the defaults at setup time - and look for a line that reads something like this:

# Set the SQL mode to strict

sql-mode="STRICT_TRANS_TABLES..."

You can either comment out the line completely, or set it to: sql-mode="

Please note that those are two single quotes ('), not a single double quote ("). Restart MySQL Server once you have made the change, which you can do easily via the Service Control item in MySQL Administrator.

As an aside, a friend was round at my home working on one of my systems and wondered how I was able to work with my Windows Server 2008 - which I was accessing at the time via Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) - because of the different keyboard layouts between Windows and my Mac laptop. I showed him that I was using the On-Screen Keyboard tool from the Windows Server 2008 Ease of Access Center whenever I needed specific Windows keys, and I was then turning it off again to carry on using my Mac laptop's keyboard whenever I needed to do any serious typing. If anyone knows of a better method that doesn't cost anything, please let me know and I'll pass it on via this column.

Once I'd done that I created a folder for my Moodle data. The only thing you need to bear in mind for this folder is that it must be located outside the website's root directory, since this folder must not be directly accessible from the internet. Set permissions on the data folder to give the IIS user account READ, WRITE and EXECUTE permissions. On previous versions of IIS this would have been the IUSR_MachineName account, but this has disappeared from IIS 7 and been replaced by a plain IUSR account. That done, head to http://download.moodle.org/ to download Moodle itself.