Well today I finally set about upgrading the Leeds City College Production Server and it has been quite an eventful day.
After making the necessary changes to Apache and PHP (namely upgrading them both) and then backing up a snapshot of the live system I began the upgrade.
Even though I have simulated this many times on a test server doing it live threw up problems I had not yet encountered. The first error I got was an Illegal mix of collations, I don’t think was a reference to the current UK government but more a warning to me to stop mucking around with the tables.
I had to run a quick query against the tables in the database
ALTER TABLE mdl_tablename CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
And this fixed things.
Then I hit my second error, “Debug info: Unknown column ‘itemid’ in ‘field list'”
Having absolutely no idea how to fix this I spent the next few hours in the forums/tracker and came out none the wiser.
I then decided to just opt for a clean install before moving on just to see if the error is more to do with my current setup. It turns out the latest snapshot of Moodle 2.1 has a slight fault in it, whereby I can’t select any themes but it installed nevertheless.
I revisited the earlier error above and still couldn’t find a fix. The Moodle developers have done a lot more work on the install script since I downloaded it several months ago and by chance I had still had an older version.
I deleted the current failed Moodle 2.0 from the server, restored the database and tried an install and to my delight this one works.
So currently it’s migrating all the course files and this will take several hours so this blog post will end here and pick up tomorrow. The plan is to upgrade this old Moodle 2.0 with the new version. I realize it’s a patchy way to work but I have no choice and time is running out as this project is due completion in 4 days from now.
And although I’m on my fifth cup of tea I’m still feeling quite calm.
