Enrollment hickups

My co-worker is out again this week.  When people call our help desk with "moodle" problems, I am the one answering the calls.

The first step is listening carefully to the customer to be sure you understand what they are saying.  I first try to figure out what instance they are using, what is the server name.  Then I listen to them describe the problem, which is often insightful.  Ask clarifying questions while being patient with them.  Once I determine I am on the right server, I will look up their account and sometimes just reset their password for them.  Today, I had to enroll an account into a course.

The call this am was a user not accessing a course, moodle was reporting they were not enrolled.  The way they were trying to access the course was via a URL directly to the course like this

 http://siteurl/course/view.php?id=249

Browsing to the course without logging in results in this message from moodle

Clicking the Continue button goes to the login screen

After providing their credentials, they were told they could not enrol themselves in the course.

I logged in as myself, accessed the course and went to Users | Enrolled users from the course admin. menu and added the users account to the course. 

The customer claims she accessed the course previously with this account, although there was another account for their district enrolled in the course that she probably used.  I was not going to argue with her, I just added the account and made her happy.  No harm no foul.

Moving a course from one server to another

Another of my clients called and asked for her login credentials on one of our RD servers where courses in development are kept.  After providing those and a note that she could only access the RD server from behind our firewall, my customer requested if I she could access the course from home.....  The short answer to that is no.  This RD server only has an internal IP address, it is not DNSed outside the firewall.  I am not going to ask the Lakenet guys to DNS this server, no need.

Instead, I suggested moving the course from the RD server to the live server, which is accessible outside the network (from her home).  She liked the idea, I copied the course from RD server to live server by simply

1. - backing up the course with all its content, but no user data on the RD server
2. - saved the backup file to a share drive
3. - restored the backup file from the share drive on the live server

Sometimes moodle is pretty smooth.