integrating Big Blue Button in Moodle using two servers behind the same router

[nick]

Hi,

I've been using BBB 0.81 for a while and have been content with the demo interface. Great program!

I'm behind a Netopia router forwarding ports 80 1935 and 9123 to a dedicated Ubuntu machine using NAT.

I installed Moodle 2.5 on a separate machine and it works fine if I redirect port 80 to this machine and forward port 443 as well.

I can connect to the demo server from blindside networks, no firewall problems.

I can connect to my own BBB server from Moodle using the internal IP address but if I then connect to Moodle from outside my LAN it won't open the BBB activity page.

http:// 192.***.*.** This page can't be displayed.

I've searched the documentation but not found anything directly related to my problem.

I've tried doing what's not recommended changing, port 80 on the BBB server but only discovered why its not to be recommended!

Is it easier to change port 80 on the Moodle server?

Or is it possible to get round the port 80 conflict some other way?

I must be missing something obvious. In particular I can't believe that no one else has their Moodle and BBB servers behind the same router, so am I missing some documentation?

Thanks in advance for all help.

Nick

[nick]

PS Oops sorry, I'm sure I should have published this in bbb setup.

N 

[HostBBB.com]

Nick,   you need to get the bbb server mapped to a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) so the config uses yourserver.com instead of the IP address.   This way the domain resolves correctly to the internal and external IPs.   the FAQ wiki has some tips on how to do this with a router.

Regards,

Stephen

hostbbb.com

[Fred Dixon]

Hi Nick,

For providing external access to an internal BigBlueButton 0.81 server running behind a firewall, see

  https://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/wiki/FAQ#Can_I_provide_external_access_to_a_BigBlueButton_server_behind_m

Regards,... Fred

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[nick]

Hi Stephen,

Thanks for your reply,

Yes, I've had the bbb server running for quite some time using a FQDN. My problems arose after installing Moodle 2.5 on another machine in my LAN. I installed the BBB plugin for moodle as an activity module The installation prompts for the URL and 'salt' of the BBB server. I couldn't get it to accept the FQDN (I can only imagine this is because I had to change the internal IP to which my router forwards port 80 to that of the new moodle machine) . The only way I could get the plugin to work was to reconfigure the BBB server to it's own internal address and then use this address when prompted by the plugin.

This allows me to access moodle and run the plugin from a third machine in my own network. However if I then try from outside my network I can access moodle but running the plugin returns the 'This page cannot be displayed' message in the external browser and cites the internal IP address of the bbb server.

The only solution I can think of is to run the moodle server behind a different router (haven't tried this yet!) or to reconfigure either moodle or bbb to use a different port than port 80. 

I tried this on bbb but without success.

Thanks again, any further help greatly appreciated.

Nick

[nick]

Hi Fred

Thanks for this.

Yes I used these pages when I originally installed bbb a few years ago now.

I've studied them minutely again but as I described in my reply to Stephen I can't see how they can help me solve the port 80 conflict between my bbb server and my moodle server.

Any ideas greatly appreciated.

Nick 

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[HostBBB.com]

Nick,

I have been able to successfully serve both BBB and Moodle served from a single port yourdomain.com :80  by using nginx proxy that takes / for example and redirects to correct server moodle server and sends thru everything else to BBB.

In my example, I actually had moodle on same server as BBB(not recommended except for light personal use!!) and proxied it to :81.

Should be able to do the same thing with 2 separate servers.

 location / {
          proxy_pass         http://127.0.0.1:81;
          proxy_set_header Host $host;
          proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
          proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
       }

this sends / to moodle and all the other stuff passes thru.

I also had to tweak a few things in bbb configs to get the default presentation and stuff to serve up thru /b location.

 # BigBlueButton landing page.
        location /b {
          root   /var/www/bigbluebutton-default;
          index  index.html index.htm;
          expires 1m;
        }

Its more of a NGINX configure and proxy challenge, and would require hand editing everything when you update servers so nothing most will want to try.

The easiest and most supportable way is to get 2 static IPS on your external interface and map these directly to each server.

regards,

Stephen

hostbbb.com

[Chad Pilkey]

I think with you could also use subdomains (moodle.test.com and bbb.test.com) that both resolve to you external IP and then in nginx use the server_name parameter to reroute your moodle traffic to your other internal server.