[Moodle] Moodle on Netspace

[Chris Ellis]

Hi Ian,

I was using the Netspace Netspace Virtual Classroom moodle for about a year.
It was great to get going with.

But as with the rest of Netspace, quality of service is not really good
enough - we've had no less than half a dozen ACS/Filter proxy issues in the
last week, and this has been going on for months.

Having invested all my coursework into the NVC moodle my classes were
stuffed when it was off the air - probably 3 days down time over the year. I
also ended up with a forum posting issue that was never resolved. The NVC
support process is take a ticket and we'll get back to you over the next
couple of days. Often time I had to put in a personal call to Mike D'Monte
to get support action happening in a timely manner.

In frustration, I installed Moodle on the local file server using XAMPP
under windows and it worked a charm, although only available on the LAN.

Meanwhile I've bought an ACER 530 server, installed Ubuntu LAMP server, had
DE&T allow it as a webserver and will be migrating Moodle to it before the
end of the year (yikes). The webserver has 2 network connections - one for
the wide world, and the other for the LAN. There is a simple php config for
Moodle which serves the Moodle locally over the LAN (to avoid IP traffic)
and still allows web browsing from outside of VicSmart. Must remember to get
VicSmart to add out Moodle to the Edulist for free traffic for the admin
network.

Under this setup, Moodle will still work regardless of having internet
access functioning.

Hope this helps. The short answer is - if you don't have the tech
skills/support at school and Netspace aren't charging for it, give it a go
while you introduce Moodle culture to your staff and students. The more
dependent you become on it, the more you will need a more reliable service,
whether local or hosted commercially.

Cheers

Chris Ellis
ICT Coordinator
Lorne-Aireys Inlet P-12 College



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