let's encrypt

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Tips for this tutorial

This tutorial is aimed at adventuresome would-be system administrators. I try not to assume any specialised knowledge on your part, and try to provide useful tips and explanation along the way to help you build a valid mental model of what you're doing. At the same, this is not a trivial process. Luckily, if you try it out, and decide not to follow through, so long as you delete your VPS, you should not be out-of-pocket by more than a few cents.

'''Update 2025-02-03:''' Here's a new tutorial for Ubuntu 24.04 and NextCloud 30! Consider this older tutorial obsolete (but possibly helpful for people with older systems).

Note: work in progress

Moodle is probably (there's little agreement among the pundits) the market-leading Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Learning Management System (LMS). It's pretty much everywhere. Here's how you can set up and maintain your own Moodle instance(s).

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This tutorial was developed for the Samoan Knowledge Society Initiative, in which the OER Foundation is very pleased to be involved. (Update 2022-02-10: we have also created a video tutorial based on this written tutorial)

At the OER Foundation we host an array of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) services. To keep things manageable, we have established a set of conventions to which we adhere, and I'm describing them here in case it's helpful to others who can either learn from, or improve on, our experience.

The OERu offers accredited tertiary (University level) courses to learners anywhere on the Internet, whether they are using desktop computers or mobile devices.

SkFor any website that requires anyone (users or even just a few admins) to transfer secrets to and from it, you want to ensure the data is end-to-end encrypted. Today various browsers (like Firefox) give warnings when you're sending secret data (like passwords) "in the clear", namely unencrypted.

Update 2021-11-08: this post is now getting a bit long-in-the-tooth, and I need to update it to use up-to-date components. It might still be useful to folks, but use it with caution. Also, please note, we're using NextCloud with OnlyOffice (the open source community edition) these days. Update 2023-06-14: Here's a new tutorial for Ubuntu 22.04!

Not long ago, Mastodon, an open source, federated alternative to the proprietary network-effect wunderkind, Twitter, came out of no where.

Our approach to technology here at the OERu is inspired by the UNIX tool philosophy which can be summarised as follows:

"create simple tools that do one job well, and make it easy to combine them to work together"