Hi Howard, Rick, et al,
Many thanks for your reflections on this. I am at a conference in Belgium right now and am writing from my hotel room at 6:29 a.m. I will be sure and mention this over a Belgian beer this afternoon at lunch, though I will still try and make it look like I'm trying to do what I can (i.e. the impossible) protection-wise.
I wanted everyone following the initial part of the saga to know that when I went back to the automated installer and removed the subdirectory I'd originally wanted to install Moodle 2.2.3 into (since I'd originally wanted several encapsulated Moodle installations running side by side) I stopped getting those odd messages about hotpot not being there and databases not found. In other words the install went 100% smoothly as long as I installed into what the installer saw as "domain name/" (i.e. .../httpdocs). Yippie! But I still have a question (sorry): since on my original site I had a setup with parallel installations of Moodle 2.2.3, I assume that links to resources contain path information about where those resources were sitting, and they are all wrong for the new installation. Maybe I'm mistaken, and I can try and check to see (unless this information is now encrypted--it wasn't in 1.9.16). In that case, since I only have one course with only 11 people in it and with all the original course resources sitting in Dropbox I can always simply sit down and recreate it in a couple hours. But it's the principle of the thing that interests me. In other words: I have a backup of the .sql file, an .mbz backup of the original course and a subdirectory with all files mirrored exactly the way they were on the original 2.2.3 install. The only difference now is which subdirectory the latter are sitting in and the fact that I now have a numerical IP address rather than the original domain name (since I am still in setup mode and the other live site has to stay running until the end of the conference since I'm demoing it at present). Another question: perhaps it would be wise once I don't need to run things from my live site to simply shut it down, go into the GoDaddy DNS Manager panel and attach the new IP address to the old domain name before continuing. In fact, if I did this it would probably be a good idea now that I can get the automated installer to give me what I want to do the reinstall on the my new VDS only after attaching the new dedicated IP address to my domain name?
Thanks again to all for making me a little more savvy about "protecting" videos. There is also always the problem of some nasty person putting a gun to a registered user's head and saying: "Hey, you, click on that link there and play that video for me. Or else...."
Gary