Spicy MoodleBox

Spicy Moodlebox is a port of Martignoni's MoodleBox to Ubuntu ARM-64 Architecture. Moodlebox is a Moodle server and Wi-Fi router on a Raspberry Pi.

All credits goes to Nicolas Martignoni for the original Moodlebox. This Spicy port was built and labelled by Dhuny Riyad as part of a research project only for performance comparison purposes. If you have reached here by accident, then you are surely searching to visit Moodlebox as this git is not regularly maintained.

As part of a vision to help education in remote areas, this work tries to upgrade the hardware and software environment of a Pi to compare the performance of Moodle on same. If this can be helpful to anybody, the comparison results are available on YouTube.

Also available, on Amazon is a book titled Portable & Home hosted Learning Management Systems which is linked to the performance comparison work. The book is still in its infancy but aims to disseminate the knowledge required to make portable Moodle LMS more common and accessible.

Contributors and reviewers for all the contents are most welcomed. A polite mail to the author would be highly appreciated.

The Spicy MoodleBox Documentation

If you want a ubuntu 64-bit version of Moodlebox, follow the instructions below to install one.

Building the Spicy MoodleBox disk image from scratch

To build a Spicy MoodleBox from scratch with this script, you need a Raspberry Pi 3B, 3B+ or 4B.

1. Clone Ubuntu ARM-64 on your microSD card. Last known working version was Ubuntu-20.04.2

2. Static Network addresses and Wifi credentials can be preconfigured in network-config present in SD card (Optional).

3. Insert the microSD card into your Raspberry Pi.

4. Connect your Raspberry Pi to your Ethernet network and boot it.

5. Login with username ubuntu password ubuntu. Set new password to Moodlebox4$.

6. Type the commands below to update and upgrade the Linux

    sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
   

7. Ubuntu will take a few minutes to upgrade as it may be running some updates already.

8. Create a ssh.txt file on the boot partition, e.g. using

    sudo touch /boot/ssh.txt
   

9. Install Ansible on your computer.

10. Install sshpass to enable passing SSH password to the Raspberry Pi. On macOS, use e.g. brew tap esolitos/ipa; brew install sshpass.

     	sudo apt install sshpass ansible -y
     	sudo apt install --no-install-recommends python3-netaddr
    

11. Clone this repository to your local drive. A quick way is:

    git clone https://github.com/dhuny/spicyMoodlebox.git

12. Create a keys directory in the repository folder and copy your public key into it, under the name id_rsa.pub.

    mkdir /home/ubuntu/spicyMoodlebox/keys/
    

13. A quick way to create public keys is:

    ssh-keygen -t rsa
    

    with blanks as defaults.

    sudo cp /home/ubuntu/.ssh/id_rsa.pub /home/ubuntu/spicyMoodlebox/keys/
    

14. Get the IP address of your Raspberry Pi ifconfig or ip a and change it in the hosts.yml file. Do not change anything else, unless you know what you're doing. You're still on your own.

15. Create a config.yml if required with cp default.config.yml config.yml.

16. Run ansible-playbook ubuntu.yml from the repository folder to prepare the OS.

17. Wait 1 -2 mins, playbook will change username from ubuntu to moodlebox, script will exit with failure.

18. Playbook will stop after username change, with an error similar to Unable to create local directories(/home/ubuntu/.ansible/cp’...

19. Reboot server with sudo init 6 and login with username moodlebox password Moodlebox4$

20. Run ansible-playbook moodlebox.yml from the repository folder.

21. Wait 15–50 minutes, depending on your Raspberry Pi model, SD card speed and Internet bandwidth. You're done.

22. On first boot run sudo passwd and change the default password.

Overriding defaults

You can override any of the defaults configured in default.config.yml by creating a config.yml file and setting the overrides in that file. For example, you can change the MoodleBox main credentials and the timezone with something like:

moodlebox_username: 'myusername'
moodlebox_password: 'secret'
moodlebox_timezone: 'Australia/Perth'

Any variable can be overridden in config.yml; see the file default.config.yml for a list of available variables.

Availability

The Moodlebox code is available on Moodlebox git. The Spicy Moodlebox code is available on SpicyMoodlebox git.

Release notes, Thanks & License

This work is simply a port of the original work by Nicolas Martignoni, please visit Moodlebox git for the Original Release Notes, Thanks and License.

This contribution is from R.Dhuny

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