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I am a noob when it comes to System Administration & Networking and I thought I would get some valuable insight from the pros in here.

I work for my University's IT department and I overlook the day to day running of the School Website. We recently decided to make a step up and adopt Moodle, which I got up and running in a few days of research and hard work. I was able to install in on a server running Ubuntu 14.04 with PostgreSQL and the main DB server.

The problem started when my head of department wanted all connections for our main website and subdomains to be secure and so we purchased a while card certificate, say *.myschool.edu for this purpose. However, please note that we host our website and moodle platforms separately. That is, myschool.edu is hosted with a Web Hosting Company while we decided to host moodle.myschool.edu internally.

I achieved this my creating a folder called moodle.myschool.edu and creating a virtual host for it. We purchased a public, dedicated IP for the server running Moodle and created an A record on the DNS host file of the myschool.edu to point moodle.myschool.edu to the server running Moodle. And everything worked perfect.

However, problems began once I installed the certificates on the moodle server. Whenever I try accessing https://moodle.myschool.edu from an external network, I get a "This site can't be reached" error. When I access the same address from my internal school network, everything resolves well and I can see the certificate loaded.

I am not sure what I could be doing wrong and I hope someone out there might know and show me or push me in the right direction into solving this.

Thanks!

realnsleo
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1 Answers1

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The problem is: It is not sufficient for the host myschool.edu to know the IP address of moodle.myschool.edu.

You have to make this information available to the (public) client that wants to access the site. You need to contact whomever is responsible for the DNS- entries of domain myschool.edu and let him create an a- record for moodle.myschool.edu that points to the public address of your internal server.

As soon as ping moodle.myschool.edu works -or at least returns the right IP- address- from the client when its outside, then it MIGHT work (firewall rules / port forwarding has to be in place as well, if the server is e.g. in a DMZ).

Tode
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