Infrastructure

Project: Infrastructure

Guilhem, the German community wants to have a Moodle server. The ticket
is in German, but Google translate could help. :-) nginx + PHP +
phpMyAdmin is needed, they will setup Moodle themselves. moodle.tdf
sounds like an ideal hostname.

Only pending question is how to access the machine. FTP is no option as
it's unencrypted, SCP/SFTP is not user-friendly if done with a public
key. Any idea? Maybe allow password-based SSH/SFTP/SCP login on this
particular box?

As for a testing instance, let's not use some obfuscated hostname as in
the proposal; rather have it as testing explicitly first and protect it
via .htaccess (or whatever nginx' equivalent is), and make it public
when everything running as expected.

Assigning to Guilhem

I created a new Virtual Machine and (minimally) configured a Moodle instance. (I think it's best if infra is not only installing the backend, but also the frontend with minimal config, so everything is deployed with TDF's current best practices. Moreover it's infra's responsibility to install security updates etc, so it's important that we know each software we host.)

The instance is currently available at [[https://vm188.documentfoundation.org]]; I'll send the admin credentials to Florian and tell him to forward them to you (I'm afraid I don't have a secure channel to you directly :-P).

However I differed from your initial request as follows:

- "Apache Server, PHP7.1 und einer Datenbank (PostgreSQL, MySQL oder MariaDB)"  Our default stack consists of Nginx 1.6 + PHP 5.6 + PostgreSQL 9.4 (the versions found in the latest Debian stable), and since they're all three supported by the latest Moodle that's what I installed.
  - phpMyAdmin: I didn't install that, and I don't think that's necessary either since Moodle and the PostgreSQL were installed locally using the command line.  Moreover exposing the Database's admin credentials to the web server increases the attack surface and AFAIK that's not in our current best practices :-P
  - "Dann benötigen wir einen ftp-Zugang zu dem htdocs Verzeichnis und dort die entsprechenden Rechte."  I've never used Moodle before so sorry for the naive question, but why would users need to access the file system directly?  One can upload files via HTTP/POST directly in the browser, using the Moodle interface.  Isn't it exactly what you want?

Hey Guilhem,

thanks for installing the Moodle-Server. Because you did this already, actual there is no need for phpMyAdmin - and - I guess - even not for an ftp access.

Lets start with this instance and if we need more help or want to change something, we come back to you:)

ftp access and database access was only required to install the moodle server. So it is fine at the moment.