Moodle 2.6 live instance notes

These are my notes to assist when I take our moodle 2.2.4 instance off line and perform an upgrade to moodle 2.6.2.  This is a risky upgrade because the DB is big, the customer is fickle and there are multiple plugins and a couple core code modifications to account for.  The good news is I have done most of the work already in a sandbox upgrade instance that allowed me to put the code back in place and work through issues that may arise when updating the live site.

These are the steps I will follow on the day I upgrade the live instance.  In this order.

1 - put the live site in main. mode (keeps people off the site, no data loss)

2 - BU the DB using mysql dump.  Name the backup studentBackup05-25-2014.sql, for example.

3 - rename the current www/student folder to www/student2.2.4.  This leaves the entire 2.2.4 code base in place in case i have a problem.  I could simply rename the directory back to www/student if I have a problem.  I would also need to restore studentBackup05-25-2014.sql from step 1.

4 - create a new directory in the www called student

5 - copy from the www/student2.2.4 the config.php file into the www/student directory

6 - Select and copy the code from www/teststudent to www/student.  teststudent contains the 2.6.2 code base, that has all the code plugins in place.  UNSELECT THE config.php file prior to copying into the student folder.

7 - open the error log on the server for the live instance, clear it out and save it.

8 - Browse the live site, which will kick off the upgrade.

9 - Ok the announcement, the server check and the plugins.  Click the Upgrade the DB button.  Mark the time.

10 - You should see the lob\column conversions with a green indicator bar, it should finish,  After about 5-10 minutes, the browser will likely stop and there will be an error in the error log "Maximum execution time of 300 seconds exceeded".   Reload the browser and the upgrade should continue without any more timeout.  After 5 - 10 minutes, you should see the green bar disappear and the individual tables names start displaying as they are converted.  Pray there are no DB errors.

11 - When the DB update is complete, you should be presented with the login screen.  Login and complete the upgrade by choosing the default values for some of the new settings.

12 - Run the assignment upgrade helper, choose all the assignments.  Could be as many as 6827.  The upgrade of all the assignments took over 1 hr on test instance.  But no timeouts occurred in the php file.

13 - Verify the enrollment and grade report.  Those are the two big hitters in terms of plugns.

Notes:  

all course files are located in moodledata folder and do not need to move or be backed up.

the DB being upgraded is about 500 MB

the problems I had during the sandbox upgrades in the database, like tables already existing, were due I think, to the php timeout, which would cause the script to re-start and run the same code that already created the table, hence the problem.

Monitor the error logs while doing sandbox upgrades, that was very helpful.

Details about problems I encountered during sandbox upgrade are chronicled here.

PHP files that I updated in the interest of curring the  "Maximum execution time of 300 seconds exceeded" error were derived from this stackoverflow post.