Moodle accessible off-campus but not on-campus

Moodle accessible off-campus but not on-campus

by Murtaza Velji -
Number of replies: 4

Hi there, I would like to begin by saying what a wonderful community there is here, as majority of my newbie questions could be answered simply by browsing the forums. Sadly my luck came to an end here. I am very much so a beginner to this, and so I'm hoping my problem is trivial.

I'm trying to get moodle accessible via the internet, but when I do, I can no longer access it connected to the school's wifi. The windows server is located on-campus, at a local IP address.

I have entered the url (including the :81 port given to me by our IT department) in the 'wwwroot' section of my php config file. With this, I can access Moodle from home without any issues. However, I have been using remote access to try logging in at the school and both the IP address and the URL return a "page not found" error.

Info about my installation:

  • I'm using a windows 2008 server R2 running 3.3+ build: 20170616
  • I used the windows quick-install to set up Moodle

What steps should I take to remedy this?

Thank you in advance for your help!


Murtaza

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In reply to Murtaza Velji

Re: Moodle accessible off-campus but not on-campus

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

Go back to your IT department. Two things....

- using port 81 rather than the standard 80 is going to cause you all sorts of problems with firewalls

- I'm guessing you have different internal and external IP addresses. Moodle does not support this (as you can only have one wwwroot setting in the config.php). The solution is to give it a proper hostname in DNS and map the hostname to different IPs internally and externally. This is one for your network/DNS people. There's nothing you can do in Moodle (except change to the new hostname when you know what it is)

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In reply to Howard Miller

Re: Moodle accessible off-campus but not on-campus

by Murtaza Velji -

Thanks for the quick reply!

I was afraid it might be something out of reach for me. I'll pass this along as best I can (I work at an international school in China and my mandarin is...less than functional). 

Thanks again!


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In reply to Howard Miller

Re: Moodle accessible off-campus but not on-campus

by Murtaza Velji -

I've been given access to the DNS manager along with the internal and external IPs as well as what I assume to be the site URL. If I have all of these, is it possible for me to complete the steps you mentioned? If so, how would I do this? I know I need to create a zone in the forward lookup directory, but that's about it.

Any help with this would be appreciated!

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In reply to Murtaza Velji

Re: Moodle accessible off-campus but not on-campus

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

You really need to speak to your network staff about this. It requires some 'local' knowledge and it's not really a Moodle thing. 

You are aiming to end up with a single hostname that resolves to two different IP addresses (internally and externally). This would require both internal and external zone files to be edited (assuming they exist). I would imagine that the zones would already exist, you are just adding a new host. 

I don't think this is something we can help you with. Not specifics anyway. 

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