From the start...

Hi everybody, just to introduce myself and my blog firstly!

I'll start by saying that this isn't my first blog, but it is my first one for quite some time - about four years to be precise.  The reason for a re-start of my blog is to work more closely with other developers in the web development field, and hopefully to help anyone in need.

Next, I'll mention what by background is.  I've been a developer in education now for about six years now, and in that time I've worked closely on new ideas, more recently working and developing a highly customised version of Moodle, which has now been branded 'Connect'.

I've worked with various different languages on different operating systems using different databases, but most of my daily work and expertise involves Windows Server 2003r2/08r2, MySQL v5.x and PHP 5.x.  For me, I would say this is now my preferred environment after working with various different combinations of the above, and for many different reasons that I won't go into just now - but I'm sure that they will be apparent in the future as this blog develops.

The current, but soon to be retired server platform that I'm running is an old HP Proliant server, with the following specification:

• Intel Xeon 3065 2.33Ghz processor
• 4Gb DDR2 Memory
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003r2
• PHP 5.2.10 (Upgraded from 5.1.9)
• MySQL 5.1.34 (Upgraded from 5.0.37)
• Microsoft IIS 6
• Moodle 1.9.0+

The server was originally bought to be a 'stop-gap' but has actually performed brilliantly during the time that it has been in service.  Personally, I believe that for 2000 users, the above specification is more than adequate.  What does let the server down especially, is IIS 6 which has increasingly become unreliable which, after doing some research, I believe is down to a corrupt IIS configuration.  Since there have been plans in the pipeline to migrate Connect to a Server 2008r2 environment for quite some time, I have left this alone for the time being.  Other than this, the server is extremely fast and has been very reliable with near enough 100% server uptime (excluding restarts for Windows updates).

Some of the posts that I will be writing shortly will be looking at:

• Move of Connect to a new Windows Server 2008r2
• Upgrading PHP 5.x
• Possible up/downgrade of MySQL
• IIS 6 deep rooted problems
• Upgrading Moodle
• Is Moodle 2.0 worth it?

The issues above are what I believe are current issues affecting my environment, and at some point I hope to have addressed all of the above.

Anyway - thanks for taking the time to read my blog, I hope that you have found this informative.  Please take the time to click on a sponsored link for me (even if you just open it and then close it!), and even follow this blog.