Troubleshooting connectivity issues

Step one - Test the Turnitin connection

1. To check the communication with Turnitin, from the Administration panel and select Site Administration.

   

2. This will reveal a drop down menu. Select Plugins > Activity modules > Turnitin Assignment

   

3. From the Turnitin Assignment page, click the Run Connectivity Test link.

   

By clicking on the Run Connectivity Test link, Moodle will try to access Turnitin. If Moodle successfully connects to Turnitin, you will receive a message that says 'Moodle has successfully connected to Turnitin'. If you receive an error message please check the configuration data that appears and fix any errors.

Step two - Show the data dump

The Show Data Dump and Save Data Dump links are useful for troubleshooting and may be referred to by Turnitin support. The Data Dump tracks all Moodle communication with Turnitin. For example, the name and date of each Turnitin assignment created within a course.

Step three - Unlink users

The Unlink Users link can be used to reset links between Turnitin accounts and Moodle accounts.

Step four - Check the CA certificate

If you encounter connectivity issues while using the Turnitin Moodle Direct integration (error: 'Turnitin API Base URL incorrect or unavailable', or error: 'Double check your API URL setting'), this could be related to a CA certificate being unavailable to cURL. If enabled, the diagnostics mode in the Turnitin plugin and viewing the Turnitin comms logs will identify if this is the case.

The Moodle Direct plugin uses the server operating system's implementation of cURL. If cURL has an out of date (or no) CA certificates, the interaction with Turnitin will fail due to cURL performing peer SSL certificate verification and not being able to verify the Turnitin SSL certificate.

Until cURL 7.18.0 some CA certificates were provided, but after 7.18.0 no CA certificates have been provided at all. Because of this, the Moodle server administrator would need to ensure that an up to date CA certificate bundle is used.

For Debian and RedHat based distributions

CA certificates are distributed in the ca-certificates package. Gentoo servers provide them via the app-misc/ca-certificates ebuild. It's also a good idea to make sure that the OpenSSL libraries (libssl) and cURL libraries (libcurl) are up-to-date on your server.

You will also need to place a file with the Bundle of CA Root Certificates (downloadable from http://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem) on your webserver and make a curl.cainfo reference to this file in your php.ini.

For Windows based servers

Please see point 4 within the link below which describes where to put/how to name the CA certificate bundle.

http://curl.haxx.se/docs/sslcerts.html

If you're not your institution's Moodle Server Administrator...

If you are not your Moodle server administrator this page might not help you resolve your issue. Please feel free to share this page with your Moodle administrator and the administrator of the server your instance of Moodle is installed upon. They should be able to use this page to help you.