Have you ever had the following error in one of your Moodle scheduled tasks ??

What this means is that and the size of the file it is trying to write is bigger than the variable currently allows, MySQL has tried to do as you’ve asked and couldn’t at which point it has packed its bags and gone home..

You might see it if you ever run a full Sync users with Azure AD on a large Moodle site.

The task will then just restart and fail the next time as well and keep looping causing your sync and Moodle site get more and more out of date with your Azure AD.

How to fix.. its pretty simple really, you just need to get MySQL’s connection to be able to write larger sized data files packages.

The default for max_allowed_packets on your Moodle’s MySQL database is likely to be 16mb

show global variables like '%max_allow%';

You want to change this to 256mb’s

You do this with the following line on your MySQL command line

set global max_allowed_packet = 268435456;

What is 268435456 ??

268435456 / 1024 / 1024 = 256 as in 256mbs, just like that 16777216 / 1024 / 1024 = 16 as in 16mbs.

This ‘should’ be enough to be able to write the data in the sync back to your database without the databases connection closing and it going off home..

😀

Having issue with your Moodle, specifically no longer being able to get to the manual login page when using either of these URL’s

https://yourMoodle/?noredirect=1

or

https://yourMoodle/login/index.php?noredirect=1

Do check that this is switched on

https://yourMoodle/admin/search.php?query=forceredirect

If you have lost access to your frontend in is in mdl_config_plugins

Check whether you Office365 plugins page is all verified, click the button, if yours is not in a state with green ticks as the below screenshot.

https://yourMoodle/admin/settings.php?section=local_o365

Reason this is needed is taken from the manual below – Why this might Undo at any stage in the future is currently unknown, if you figure this out, let us know in the comments.

Verify Setup

1. This tool verifies that Azure has been correctly set up. Click the “Update” button to check setup.
2. If the tool reports any missing permissions, return to Azure and ensure that all required permissions have been added to your configured application for Moodle.

Have you a lot of courses to delete within Moodle & tried doing it via the frontend ?

Quickly you will learn that this is a complete nightmare and may work & most probably wont!

So how do you go about deleting from the CLI on the server?

Create your .csv file, use Excel or other application

You only require a shortname and delete column

You can get the shortname like this from the database with this bit of SQL

Select shortname, '1' As 'delete' from mdl_course
Where shortname like '%1314%';

Export the output of this as a CSV and there is no need for Excel 😉

Now its time to jump on the server & head to

/var/www/moodle/docroot/admin/tool/uploaduser/cli

Create yourself a Screen session with something like

screen -S "RR #12345 1314 Course delete for XYZ"

And run something like this .. check your directory paths, don’t just trust me !

sudo -u www-data php uploaduser.php --mode=update --updatemode=dataonly --file=/var/www/moodle/tmp/All-1314-CoursesFrom-mdl_course.csv --delimiter=comma --allowdeletes |tee /var/www/moodle/tmp/deletecourses-1314_log.txt

Press CTRL + A + D to exit the screen session and come back in a few days, either by checking the log file you piped it out to or the Session itself to see if it has finished.

To note www-data is the group which your Moodle is running its commands as

In my new role I seems to have lines and lines of numbers from scheduled tasks logs and the like, which I then have to action quickly back into SQL queries. So I thought I write down how I do that.. for two reason.

1. You might stumble across it
2. I may forget how to do it 😁

Launch Notepad ++

Press CTRL + H to bring up Replace

Find what:

^(.+)$

Replace with:

‘\1’,

Select Regular expression

Replace All

This coverts the above list of numbers into the following format

This way you can now wrap that in brackets and query it.

Good Morning, just thought I’d write a quick post about the blocks within the Boost theme in Moodle 4.

I’ve noticed that every block has the block’s name as a title. In our instance of Moodle 4 we do not want them as it duplicates what the content already displays.

So this is the CSS you need to pop into Boost / Advanced Settings /admin/settings.php?section=themesettingboost#theme_boost_advanced in the box ‘Raw SCSS theme_boost | scss’

/* Hide My Office365 block title */
.block_microsoft  .card-title {
    display: none!important;
}

/* Hide My Overview block title */
.block_myoverview .card-title {
    display: none!important;
}

In our case this does the following, the two blocks goes from this

To this

Hope that helps someone out there. I’m documenting this so I do not forget it when we go live to Moodle 4.1 in June 2023