Supporting my ever changing moodle instance

We have had a bunch of new course requests the past week or two and had a number of other support requests.   Support request = help me figure this out please. Our response to a course request is the following steps - this is a good process

Process 1 - deploying a new course

1. determine if we have a backup of the course - log into our backupmaster account.
2. deploy (restore) the course into a existing teacher category
3. enroll the teacher into the course
4. copy the course short name from moodle into the LMS ID of a matching section in Genius SIS
5. inform our customer that the course is ready for enrollments

Process 2 - creating or splitting up a course into semesters

1. Find the course backup and restore it
2. Restore the course backup again, creating a second copy of the course
3. Remove the contents from each of copies (copy 1 = semester 1) copy 2 = semester 2
4. Update the course shorts names using this pattern courseName-year-teachname
5. Copy the course names to the matching Genius sections
6. Enroll the teacher in each course

In a couple cases, we have to create the teacher account in moodle - the teacher accounts from our front end Genius SIS do not synch with moodle, just the student enrollments synch.  We also have to often find the email address - since that is required on the Genius and moodle side.

Process 3 - why is this student Genius account not synching with Moodle?

I had to update the authentication type of the account in moodle from manual to DB.  All account creation is now happening in the Genius side and pushing to moodle.  This particular account has a username that matched the one coming from Genius - but could not synch because of the authentication type.  Always so obvious in hindsight!

This is my job, I solve problems.  I monitor systems proactively to spot problems but most of my time now is spend monitoring my email for problems reported by

1. my customer
2. teachers
3. students
4. administrators
5. tech people
6. co-workers

etc

I am a problem solver.  I used to be a software developer, but even then, I was still a problem solver.

 Also had to update the quiz attempts setting for a couple courses, where the teacher requested multiple attempts on some quizzes but not others.  This is a new teacher with a new course and with 14 students.  Think "how can I be helpful here?"  One way to be helpful is update those settings for her in the course.  We were going to send instructions so she could do it, but our customer pushed back a little and said she had enough on her plate with this course.....fine. 

My co-worker Shirley did the updates to the courses via the moodle interface....like our teacher could have done, the teacher account has the permissions.  I could have done the updates in a script, like we do for many other course options, or I could have done directly in the moodle table - but that is not a best practice.  Editing directly in live DB table = not good practice.

Quizzes and assignments are very popular in our courses.

We have another course where a video play option was not working in a particular browser.  My new colleague Mike diagnosed this problem well and came up with a solution to change the HTML tag in the video from
We changed from old html embed tag to a native html 5 tag.  The native tag is better since it does not require help from another plugin to run.

We looked in the httpd.conf file for the apache MIME configuration.

On one of our other moodle instances (v.2.6), WFLBOCES -  There was a student trying to upload a document from her Google Docs location.  We, someone,  had enabled the Google repository in the moodle site and had supplied key information.

Site admin - Plugins - Repositories - Manage Repositories

Google drive configuration

The short of it was the data in these two text boxes was inherited from a couple years earlier, when we set this up in moodle 2.2.  Once we updated this, the student was able to upload content from her Google drive space.