Hosting Moodle In School

I'm at a special secondary with about 50 pupils. Whenever I ask at school where we are with setting up a VLE I get lots of grumbling about how they are too expensive, too complicated for pupils, we wouldn't use it etc. Most of which I can understand as £1000-£1500pa for LP+ does seems a little steep.

I'm looking at possible buying a server and hosting Moodle onsite. My cunning plan is move all of the hundreds of photos and videos we have on to the server, allowing staff and pupils to access them in school via Moodle, hopefully convincing them that VLE aren't that evil, and then can start work on setting it up for parent access.

Any idea what I would need to ask EMBC to do? I'm guessing a port would need to be opened at their end to allow access to the server. Or is this a hare brained idea on a 2mb connection?

Cheers,
Neil

Probably less crazier than hosting it on the outside if the vast majority of your work is during work hours where you could benefit from the local network connection over the internet.

It's very straight forward to sort out with EMBC/Synetrix. (The company I work for has a few Moodles within EMBC (Northamptonshire))

You sort out the internal IP (from your assigned range) for your Moodle server, contact EMBC and ask for a public IP to NAT to your internal IP (and DNS entry if you need one) together with access on port 80 (or 443 if you want to do it that way).

That's pretty much it mate :)

Excellent! Saves me going to another half dozen VLE demos!

Thanks

you might want to look at something like phpmotion if you're look at video and pictures

For Northants schools only wanting ports 80 and 443 then you can send the firewall change request form back to Synetrix directly as I have pre-authorised those. I have stuck a copy on the Network Northants site if you don't already have copy.