Ethernet access

roloncito

hello everyone..
I want to use this moodleBox by ethernet. i see the tutotial to change the DNS in my router.

but, Itried this.. but didnt work..

$CFG->wwwroot = 'http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].'/moodle';
in a normal server can run in any ip with that line. but in moodleBox dont..

someone have idea how to work in a ethernet network?.- I dont want to use it on wifi..

thanks to all

Ratna

roloncito Your post is indeed unclear. Let me guess:

You have connected the MoodleBox to the home network through an Ethernet cable.
You have found out its IP address by looking at the router of your home network. Let's say x.x.x.x.
You want to visit the Moodle box from a client in the home network by typing http://x.x.x.x.
If that is what you are doing? MoodleBox will not display its Moodle site. Instread the address in the URL window of the browser will change to http://moodlebox.home and it'll say no such server. Could you confirm?

Nicolas

It's not clear to me what you want to do. could you please elaborate, eg. with a use case? Or is it what is written here: https://moodlebox.net/en/help/how-to-access-the-moodlebox-via-ethernet/?

What (exact) steps have you made to your configuration?

roloncito

Ratna
No. 1. I have a home network through an Ethernet cable and, I want to use through Ethernet. no through WIFI..

kutipoy

Ratna im having this problem now... what could be the solution? Thanks

Nicolas

roloncito Please answer to this, otherwise we won't be able to help.

What (exact) steps have you made to your configuration?

Ratna

roloncito Your posts are too short for me to understand. Here I assume that you want exactly what I wrote in my prevous post. In that case make $CFG->wwwroot = 'http://x.x.x.x', where x.x.x.x is the (private) IP address of the ethernet interface of your MoodleBox.

Nicolas

By the way:

$CFG->wwwroot = 'http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].'/moodle';

Such a setting is strongly discouraged for any Moodle server and leads to problems, as all Moodle resources are stored in the database with the full URL of the server. If the IP address changes, which is common on DHCP configuration, this will fail your Moodle sooner or later. Don't do it.

If your Moodle must be responding on multiple IP addresses or domain names, use proper masquerading and DNS. See eg. https://docs.moodle.org/36/en/Masquerading.

krause

Hi roloncito,
please look at https://moodlebox.net/de/help/zugang-ueber-ethernet/ ... the german translation shows a practical way to connect to your MoodleBox from ethernet. There a two possible configurations for this idea.

1. Configure the dns server
The dns server of your router tells every client which ip address is needed to connect your MoodleBox when you type in the dns name moodlebox.home into the address field your browser.

2. Configure the .hosts file
Every computer looks into his own .hosts configuration file to get the ip address for localhost but also to get its own dns name. If you add the ip address and the dns name of the MoodleBox. You should find the .hosts configuration file in the /etc folder. On my mac computer the .hosts file has the following content.

I hope you will get it.

Best regards, Ralf

##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting.  Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1        localhost
255.255.255.255  broadcasthost
::1              localhost
##
# MoodleBox connection via Ethernet
# MoodleBox must get an ip address via dhcp
192.168.1.143    moodlebox.home    moodlebox
##

TCLI

Ratna,

As per your reply of February 2nd, this is exactly what I am trying to achieve. Actually, I would like to be able to reach the Moodlebox on both Wifi and Ethernet interface. The difference in our environment is that our router does not do DNS as we rely on Google DNS to do the FQDN to numeric IP translation.

Is there a way to achieve this?

Thanks.

Louis.

Ratna

TCLI Hi, the documented way to achieve this is what Ralf wrote previously in this thread: i.e. the URL will be https://moodlebox.home. The devices conneted via wi-fi will get this resolved to 10.0.0.1. The problem is the ethernet side. The devices on that network must resolve the same moodlebox.home to whatever the IP the MoodleBox got from the DHCP server of that network.
If that is not possible on your network, here is a hack. which I haven't tested: Make the (common) URL of MoodleBox http://its.ether.net.ip by editing ./config.php. The router in the MoodleBox might still deliver Moodle "from the ethernet side". The down side is, this IP address will vary depending on what the MoodleBox gets from the DHCP server! Therefore makes only sense if you can make the DHCP server always assign the same IP address to the MoodleBox.

TCLI

Worked as prescribed. Thanks!!

Louis.

Ratna

TCLI Glad that it helped!

Forgot to mention earlier, you need to run the https://docs.moodle.org/36/en/Search_and_replace_tool once you change the URL of a Moodle site.

krause

Please look at https://discuss.moodlebox.net/d/60-connect-an-access-point-to-the-moodlebox/6

The MoodleBox gets a static ip address from the router. The MoodleBox is connected to the LAN and you can call the MoodleBox with the url moodlebox.home or with the static ip address.

Ratna

kutipoy Sorry, your (new) problem is not clear to me. Could you please make a new start, ideally in a new thread?

Nkduodu

Hi All,

i'm a bit confused with this ethernet setup. So i connected my MoodleBox (a RPI4 with 4GB) to my home router. I have an IP address of 192.168.1.10. I assigned that address to the Moodlebox in the router as a static/reserved IP address and also renamed the device in the router's interface from Unknown to Moodlebox.home. I used WinSCP from a wired laptop to connect to the Moodlebox using the IP address. I then edited the CFG file to http://192.168.1.10. and saved it. when i open a browser on my laptop and type in 192.168.1.10 i can connect to the moodelbox (hurray).

Where do i make the change to not use the IP address but rather the moodlebox.home? in my router or in that cfg file? i tried editing the cfg file with http://moodelbox.home but that gave an error of page not found. so i reverted to the working IP address.
i'm trying to get this up as a test lab so i can set up a 21 seater classroom of RPI4s accessing another RPI4-Moodlebox. Any clear help is much appreciated. Thank you.

Nicolas

Nkduodu Where do i make the change to not use the IP address but rather the moodlebox.home? in my router or in that cfg file?

On your router. See https://moodlebox.net/en/help/how-to-access-the-moodlebox-via-ethernet/#configure-your-router-s-dns-server.

Nkduodu

So just an update. i couldn't find how to access the DNS part of my router so i just kept the IP address in the cfg file. Nce thing is i can access the Moodlebox from devices connected to my home network (both wired and wireless). This will suffice for now till i figure out this DNS name thing or get a new router that has it. Thanks to you all.

Ratna

Nkduodu You thought of updating the old "moodlebox.home" strings in the database to the IP address?
https://docs.moodle.org/37/en/Moodle_migration#Update_links_containing_wwwroot_in_the_database

Nkduodu

Hi Ratna,

no i haven't done that (didn't even know something like that existed). I'm a newbie to all this stuff. Will make those changes and see how that goes. Thanks.

Ratna

Nkduodu In running Moodle on your own, you have to play three roles: the teacher (or the content creator), the Moodle administrator (user 'admin' or 'moodlebox') and the system administrator (through Unix shell). If you are new to all three, well that'll be a challenge. Two are more realistic. For example, you can accept the system that comes with Moodle and concentrate on the first two. Then you are in the area of generic Moodle, which has a huge community under https://moodle.org/course/.