Best Practices In Moodle Administration

1. Best Practices in Moodle
Administration
Jonathan Moore
Founder

2. Background and Context
●
Managed thousands of Moodle sites
●
Managed millions of Moodle user accounts
●
Over 10 years experience with Moodle
●
Tuning, scalability, and performance expert
●
Author of Moodle Module Development

3. Format
● Variety of tips / tricks
● Learn the possibilities
● Some hands on
● Ask questions!
● Share your tips

4. Getting to Know You
● How many were in this
session last year?
● Interest in new features in
2.8 / 2.9?

5. Getting to Know You
● How many new
admins?
● How many running
Moodle 2.6? Moodle
2.7? Moodle 2.8?
● Anyone running
Moodle older than
2.6?
● Any Moodle 1.9
sites?
● Are you a 'geeky

6. Getting to Know You
● How many host your own Moodle site?
● What OS are you running?
● What web server are you running?
● What database are you running?
● What are you hoping to learn today?

7. Outages
● 80% of failures are bad changes
● 80% of downtime finding the bad change

8. Outages
● 80% of failures are bad changes
● 80% of downtime finding the bad change

9. Moodle Mission Critical?
Use Change Management!
● Have a stakeholder change advisory board
● Who are our stakeholders?
● What should we control?
● What causes downtime?
● What causes user issues?

10. Hands-on
● Forming a Change Advisory Board
● Who?
● How often?
● What are we controlling?

11. Change Management Tips
● Control settings management
● Control module approval
● Control stack changes
● Document the how's and why's
● Be responsive
● Read the Visible Ops book

12. Hands-on
● Local Moodle install
● Moodle.org
– Downloads
– Current builds
– Choose Mac / PC

13. Admin Know Thy Server
● Monitoring: Cacti / Zennoss
● SNMP monitoring
● Round robin log storage
● Alerts and Notifications: Nagios
● SNMP alert system
● Have your servers page or text you!

14. ●
Linux most used for scalability
●
Windows lower performance for PHP
apps, but improving
●
Mac OSX forking performance issue
●
Apache and MySQL concurrency issue
Platform Selection

15. Performance Tips
● PHP Accelerator – APC / OPCache
● MySQL –
– Buffers and Query Caching
– Use InnoDB
– Use MariaDB build
● Sessions
● Moodle source code location

16. Performance Tweaking
● Memory Budget
● Concurrency
● 5 Things Making Your Site Slow
● Testing

17. Hands-on
● Visit phpinfo
● Site Administration → Server →
phpInfo
● Confirm PHP version
● Confirm if PHP Accelerator

18. More Tips
● Batch cron.php runs for multiple Moodles
● Check state of indexes and bigints
● Perform database maintenance

19. Performance Testing Tools
● Admins
– jMeter
– Apache ab utility
● Devs
– Behat / Sellenium
– XProf

20. JMeter Benchmarking
● Simulates simultaneous user activity
● Gathers response and throughput results
● Not a browser can't test javascript
● Can use to measure +/- of changes
● Can use to estimate expected concurrency, but
harder
● Moodle 2.6 and onward has builtin integration

21. User Management
● Plan ahead Moodle sites grow fast!
● Measure twice cut once
● Automate

22. 
Great combination: LDAP authentication with
external database enrolment

Automate account creation

Enrollment Plug-ins
− Automate course creation
− Automate teacher assignment
− Automate student enrollments

Synchronization scripts
A Better Way – Automate!

23. 
Automate user creation, course creation and
enrolments

Use LDAP auth + external DB enrolment

Get higher adoption rates from instructors

Instructor can focus more time on teaching less on the
technology
Just-in-Case Model

24. Hands-on
● Bulk upload users with a flat file
● External DB enrollmet setup

25. Roles
● Avoid changing built in roles
● Remember reset defaults option
● Know what level to apply roles at
– Admin: global
– Course Creator: global, or category
– Student, Teacher: course
● Know what level capabilities work at
● Make new roles by copying most similar existing role

26. Hands-on
● Duplicate a role and edit

27. ●
Course backups not a full backup!
●
Disable automated course backups?
●
Yesterday instance
●
Backup Elements
●
Moodle code
●
Moodledata
●
Database
Backups Management

28. Hands-on
● Make a Moodle backup
– Copy Moodle source dir
– Copy Moodle data dir
– 'dump' database to sql file

29. ●
Use an issue tracker / ticket system
●
Get a detailed user report
●
Use Moodle debugger
●
Reproduce issue
●
Use search
●
Google
●
Moodle tracker
●
Moodle forums and docs
Finding and Fixing

30. Hands-on
● Enable debugging
● Site Admin → Development →
Debugging
● Increase debugging level
● Enable display
● Enable performance info

31. Moodle Issue Tracker
 Use notification screen to confirm version
 Moodle Issue Tracker
»Vote for bugs
»Set a watch your important bugs
»Store issue ID in your support system
for later reference
»http://tracker.moodle.org

32. Hands-on
● Visit issue tracker
● Http://tracker.moodle.org

33. Custom Development and Modules
 Don't load modules just because they are
available
 Use modules over “hacks”
 Use the forums to evaluate modules
 Use the author's profile to research the creator
 Consider long term availability
 Consider security

34. Common Plug-in Types
● Blocks
● Activity modules
● Filters
● Auth
● Enrollment
● Local
● Themes

35. PhpMyAdmin / Adminer

Useful and powerful, but dangerous

Useful to pull reports not built into Moodle

Change settings not in GUI

Fix Moodle when “broken” by user error

Reset administrator password if locked out

36. Hands-on
● Install the certificate module
● Install Adminer

37. MyODBC
 Windows client software
 Connect MySQL to desktop applications
 Make ad hoc reports in MS Access, Excel,
Open Office, etc.

38. Various Admin Helpers
● Moodle debug
● General debugging
● Performance debugging
● phpinfo – confirm your php build
● iperf – test your network
● Iostat / sar – linux disk usage stats
● strace – see what a process is doing

39. Security
● Security report
● Use password salts
● User passwords – less secure then ever!
– Know about password managers like
lastpass and keepass
● Don't give web server user write
permissions to Moodle source

40. General Security
● Select Enterprise class OS with long term update
support.
● Automate updates / have set release schedule
● Moodledata outside of web root
● Try mod_sec
● Consider using weekly stable git for Moodle auto
updates
● Consider forced logins
● HTTPS logins

41. General Security
● Select Enterprise class OS with long term update
support.
● Automate updates / have set release schedule
● Moodledata outside of web root
● Try mod_sec
● Consider using weekly stable git for Moodle auto
updates
● Consider forced logins
● HTTPS logins

42. Hands-on
● Run security report
● Enable force logins
● Show secure logins setting
● Show kpass/last pass password manager
● Go to Moodle Docs security FAQ

43. Email delivery
 Make sure you have valid reverse DNS
 Make sure you have permission to send email
for primary administrator's email account
 Use email debug to help diagnose problems.

44. Custom themes
 Start with a basic theme
 Copy existing theme to a new folder name
 Prevents upgrades from wiping out
 Test on a non-production site
 Test with many browsers / screen sizes

45. Hands-on
● Change theme
● Open theme settings
● Add image
● Change colors

46. Questions?
● http://elearningconsultancy.com
● jonathan@elearningconsultancy.com
● Twitter: @moorejon
● Skype: moorejon07

47. What we do
● Expert advice and eLearning program review
● Evangelism and training
● Instructional design
● Custom development
● System tuning
● Performance assessment