[Server-devel] local software repository (Re: school tools)

[Holger Levsen]

Hi,

I thought I also drop this information here (to put it in a wiki or directly 
into fai scripts later), which Martin Langhoff forwarded to me, which was 
from a private mail exchange, where he described the setup he has done:

Two questions: 

1. dont we live in LSB land? :) 

2. If we dont track official moodle releases, we need to make+track our own... 
which we have to do for quite some software. This (own yum repository) also 
needs to be planned, documented and implemented properly. I've setup one on 
xs-test, but I guess laptop.org already has one for the creation of the XO 
images?!

More on the second point tomorrow...


regards,
	Holger


---- begin forwarded mail:---------------------------------

Installed a base install of Moodle on http://xs-test.laptop.org/moodle/
Login as 'admin', password: 'xxxxxxxxx'

- I've created a mdl18-olpc branch on my git Moodle repo. Note that this
is not the official Moodle SCM (which is CVS) but a repo where we track
CVS and have freedom to create more branches. I'll take care of merging
into CVS all the code we can fold into the official release.

 The branch is at

http://git.catalyst.net.nz/gitweb?p=moodle-r2.git;a=shortlog;h=mdl-18-olpc

  Grab it with
    sudo git-clone http://git.catalyst.net.nz/git/moodle-r2.git

  I've created a mdl18-olpc branch tracking the head by the same
  name in the repo.

  To update to latest code in mdl18-olpc just do
    sudo git-pull

- Installation details on the server

  created /var/www/moodle/htdocs
          /var/www/moodle/data (file storage, owned by apache)

  In an LSB world I'd put the 'data' dir in /var/lib/moodle ;-)

- MySQL

  Ooops! mysql -uroot is passwordless from any account! Maybe this is on
purpose, just to make my life easier. If not, I'd recommend Debian's
approach: on rpm's postinst, create /root/my.cnf with a random passwd,
so root (and cronjobs as root) can issue `mysql -uroot` without password.

  I just did:
   CREATE DATABASE moodle
      DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
  GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON moodle.* TO moodleweb
      IDENTIFIED BY 'BadPassword';
  FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

- Installed php-mysql package

- eAccelerator

Moodle sees significant impact from using a precompiler. Of the current
crop, eAccelerator (fork of TurckMMCache) is the most mature one. So I did

  sudo yum install php-eaccelerator

NOTE: php-eaccelerator is non-free, due to a silly license conflict
between the PHP license (BSD-ish, but includes a trademark protection
clause) and GPL. Is there an OLPC policy on this?

APC is free of such concerns AFAIK, but it's not as stable, and
definitely not as fast.

- Configuration files

  /etc/httpd/conf.d/moodle.conf
  /etc/cron.d/moodle
  /var/www/moodle/htdocs/config.php

There's more to tweak in terms of tuning. Should I?

 - MySQL performance & memory footprint tuning
 - Apache/PHP perf and memory footprint
 - Session handling
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