Best Practices in Moodle Administration is a summary of the key points to consider when approaching this vital role. The content is based on best practices collected through experience of managing thousands of Moodle sites, with over 4,500,000 registered user accounts and over 9 years of community involvement. It will be of equal interest to the institutional technical administrator and someone looking after a smaller site. It will cover many subjects including: - performance tuning - monitoring - user authentication - system security

1. Best Practices in Moodle
Administration
Jonathan Moore
CTO and Vice President RL-UK

2. RL Background and Context

Over 3000 hosted Moodle sites

Over 12 million registered Moodle
accounts

Over 2,000,000 Moodle courses

Hosting Moodle sites since 2004

Virtualized Infrastructure

3. Know What's Happening
on Your Server

Monitoring: Cacti
SNMP monitoring
Round robin log storage

Alerts and Notifications: Nagios
SNMP alert system
Have your servers page or text you!

4. Roles

Don't change built in roles
Remember reset defaults option

Know what level to apply roles at
Admin: global
Course Creator: global, or category
Student, Teacher: course

Know what level capabilities work at

Make new roles by copying most
similar existing role

5. Performance Tips

PHP Accelerator – APC

MySQL –
Buffers and Query Caching
Use InnoDB
Use Percona build

Sessions

Moodle source code location

6. Performance Testing

Try jMeter

Try Apache ab

7. Just-in-Case Model

Automate user creation, course creation and
enrolments

Use LDAP auth + external DB enrolment

Get higher adoption rates from instructors

Instructor can focus more time on teaching less
on the technology

8. Backups Management

Course backups not a full backup!

Disable automated course backups?

Yesterday instance

Backup Elements
Moodle code
Moodledata
Database

9. Platform Selection

Linux most used for scalability

Windows significantly lower
performance for PHP apps

Mac OSX forking performance
issue
Apache and MySQL concurrency
issue

10. Issue Tracker

Use notification screen to confirm
version

Moodle Issue Tracker
Vote for bugs
Set a Watch your important bugs

11. phpMyAdmin

Useful and powerful, but
dangerous

Useful to pull reports not built into
Moodle

Change settings values not in GUI

Fix Moodle when “broken” by user
error

Reset administrator password if
locked out

12. Various Admin Helpers

Moodle debug
General debugging
Performance debugging

phpinfo – confirm your php build

iperf – test your network

iostat – linux disk usage stats

strace – see what a process is
doing

13. Custom Development and
Modules

Don't load modules just because
they are available

Use modules over “hacks”

Use the forums to evaluate
modules

Use the author's profile to research
the creator

14. Change Management
• Enforce change controls
• Engage stack holders in change
management
• Visible Ops

15. Security - Update

Security report

Use password salts

User passwords – less secure then
ever

Don't give web server user write
permissions to Moodle source

16. General Security

Select Enterprise class OS with long
term support.

Automate or schedule updates

Moodledata outside of web root

Try mod_sec

Consider using git for Moodle
auto/scheduled updates

Consider forced logins

HTTPS logins

17. More Security

Disable MySQL networking

Set the MySQL root user password

See Moodle Docs Security Page
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Security

18. Email delivery

Make sure you have valid reverse
DNS

Make sure you have permission to
send email for primary
administrator's email account

Use email debug to help diagnose
problems.

19. Custom themes

Start with a basic theme

Copy existing theme to a new
folder name

Prevents upgrades from wiping
out

20. Questions?
Email:
jonathan@remote-learner.co.uk
Twitter:
moorejon