Alex Little

After having moved the our elearning server over from the Business Campus over to the main data centre at Arid Campus, I was then ready to change the operating system. Originally the server was running Windows Server 2003, but all the rest of the main University server are running either Debian or Ubuntu – so it made sense to switch over to one of these for consistency if nothing else

So yesterday morning I backed up the Moodle database, files etc and set about installing Ubuntu – it was actually far quicker than I’d first thought it would be. Within an hour I had the basic system back up and running, with just a few small tweaks left to do. So I was very pleased there weren’t any major disasters getting this set up. The only slight issue I found was that I also upgraded Moodle from 1.9.3 to 1.9.5 and it complained about the database not being unicode which was slightly puzzling, all I needed to do was run:

ALTER DATABASE `moodle` CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;

and then the Moodle upgrade continued normally without any complaints.

Since the change of operating system I’ve already found a number of advantages:

1. I can now set this server up as a cache form Ubuntu/Debian desktop updates – using apt-cacher (thanks to Liam for the info and guide on getting this set up). There are already a number of people using Ubuntu here on their desktop, and the more bandwidth is saved by using apt-cacher. Now just to let people know how to configure it on their machines.
2. ClamAV works much better with Moodle/Unix than it does with Windows. It was possible to get working with Windows, but needed a bit of tweaking (see: http://alexlittle.net/blog/2008/10/07/ive-finally-made-some-progress/).
3. It seems much faster in generating pages (ok, I don’t have any benchmarks to verify this – but the site generally feels much more responsive than it previously did.)

So I’m pleased to have finally made the change, plus there are more staff (usually from IT dept) beginning to use Ubuntu.