In the late-Winter of 2009, I was contacted by the Executive Director of Technology for the Forney Independent School District requesting assistance in upgrading their existing instance from MOODLE 1.7.x to MOODLE 1.9.x. The platform is hosted at http://moodle.forneyisd.net/moodle and is open the public.

 

Forney ISD requested, for internal security purposes, that the server be configured as a Windows 2003 Enterprise-based, IIS, MySQL, PHP stack.

 

In addition to upgrading the instance of MOODLE, the Learning Activity Management System (LAMS) was also deployed on their server with an active data-bridge connecting LAMS to MOODLE.

 

LAMS requires several additional runtime environments beyond the relatively simple setup of MOODLE. In addition to a web server, MySQL, and PHP, LAMS requires Java Runtime Environment and an active JAVA Tomcat server to function. LAMS itself must be launched as a service wrapper of JAVA Tomcat.

 

The full upgrade and transition process took 4 consecutive 10-hour days to complete. All work for this job was completed on-site at the Forney ISD Technology Annex in Forney, TX.

 

The work took so long to complete due to security configurations on the web server per Forney ISD guidelines, which slowed the deployment process down.

In the late-Spring of 2011, I was contacted by the new Executive Director of Technology at Forney Independent School District requesting upgrades be performed on their existing instance of MOODLE. The platform is hosted at http://moodle.forneyisd.net/moodle and is open the public.

 

The request contained two parts:

 

1. Upgrade from MOODLE 1.9.x to 2.0.x
2. Remove LAMS Interactivity Bridge to MOODLE

 

All work was completed in about 16 hours off-site via RDC over a VPN link to the Forney ISD network.

In late-September of 2011, the hardware hosting the MOODLE platform at Forney ISD suffered a series of rapidly successive hard disk drive failures.

 

The Forney ISD Technology Department was able to create a temporary resolution to operate on the surviving hard disk drives until major maintenance could be completed.

 

Over the Thanksgiving Break (November 2011), the MOODLE platform was moved from the failing hardware to new hardware in a new configuration.

 

Due to the size and amount of traffic being generated on the MOODLE platform, the server was split from its front-end and back-end. The front-end server was established as a CentOS Linux, Apache, PHP stack while the back-end server was established as a CentOS Linux, MySQL stack.

 

Once the servers were operational, the data files form the old server were transferred across the network backbone to the new front-end server and the database was exported and transferred across the network backbone to the new back-end server.

 

All work on the split and transition was completed in 8 hours and was performed off-site via RDC/VNC over a VPN link.