Things I have done the past few days in support of my moodle instances...

A bunch of smallish things, but want to process for sake of retention and explanation.

Found a requested course in my backupmaster account list. This is the account we use when creating new courses backups.  Restoring a course is the primary method to deploy a new course when our customer asks for one.  The course was not in the Master | Vendor category.

Formatted the deployed course - running my scripter script on it.  Sets many of the course properties to my customer and his teachers liking.  Assignments file size limit, # of files per upload, quizzes - attempts, time allowed, forums 5 points each, gradebook; setting up two categories and moving graded items around, course conditional activities.

Synched the deployed course to our external authentication and enrollment system, Genius SIS.  Meaning I copied the moodle course short name into the synched Genius SIS section LMS ID.

Logged in as the user already enrolled in the deployed course - from Genius.

Tested and verified that one of my moodle instances - that uses LDAP external authentication would allow me to fill blank email addresses with duplicated dummy address.  This moodle customer is setting up some grade school courses and does not assign email addresses to the students.  The student was able to login moodle using their LDAP credentials - but when the account was created, without an email, moodle would go to the account edit page and ask for one.  This would be acceptable behavior IF THE STUDENTS WERE NOT 10 YEARS OLD and did not have email.  So, we simply filled the email of the authenticated accounts in moodle with a filler email - duplicating it.  AND, I asked the customer if they could fill that field on the LDAP side, so we would not have to continue doing this.   I did this directly in the mdl_users table, editing the accounts.

In the same moodle instance, I turned off the password policy in moodle, since that was now the control of the LDAP accounts.  Passwords created there trickle down or over to moodle.  Verified that once the account is created, that NO UPDATES MADE TO THE LDAP account will trickle over to moodle.  There is an option to attempt this in moodle, but we left that off for now.

Helping one of my customers with some SQL.  She went for training recently, but was a little overwhelmed by having to create her own SQL statements.  I coached her a bit but refused to look at the sample *prototype report that she needs.  Been there done that for her.  She needs to at least come up with the SQL before we even discuss the actual reporting aspect.  She has to feel the pain of not getting it to appreciate it when she does get it.   We recently where set up so we could remote into the Genius SIS DB, where here data is that she is trying to query - report.

Helped one of my teachers - whom at the bequest of my customer, in the gradebook added 0's to a number of quizzes and assignments, after they became due.  I advised this on a small scale as we did not know the impact of doing this.  The consequence was after the student did take a quiz, the grade would not show in the User or Grader report in moodle and the assignment would not allow the student to upload a new file.   I guess it processed the 0 as a final grade and would not allow the user to upload an additional file.  Once I removed the Overridden property check for the quiz or assignment grade - things worked correctly.