Oracle Free Machine Usage

Oracle offers permanently free cloud machines, and I recently deployed and started using them. Here’s a summary of the experience.

Free Machine Application

For application guidance, I recommend checking out this guide

If it doesn’t work, try changing your proxy IP and attempt multiple times.

How Many Machines Allowed?

According to some introductions, the maximum is 4 machines with total disk space limited to 200GB. I tried and only claimed 2 machines, using the default elastic disk space.

Configuration/Stability

1. I’ve been using it as a proxy for 1.5 years - latency is noticeable but acceptable, after all, it’s free so can’t complain too much
2. Default configuration is 1GB RAM, which is sufficient for running basic services
3. 10TB/month traffic, shared across multiple instances

About Creating Instances

1. Use the default instance image - many others may incur charges, while the default is permanently free
2. Default login method is key-based authentication, so be sure to save your private key to avoid being unable to log in after creation

Terminal Login

1. Default login account is opc, requiring private key authentication

2. After logging in, you can switch to root account using sudo su root and enable password login

   vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
   
   PermitRootLogin yes
   PasswordAuthentication yes
   
   service sshd restart
   
   # Change root user password
   sudo passwd root
   

3. Default firewall is enabled. If deploying external services, remember to open firewall ports or directly disable the firewall service

Common Issues

Please login as the user “opc” rather than the user “root”

vi ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Delete the following section

no-port-forwarding,no-agent-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,command="echo 'Please login as the user \"opc\" rather than the user \"root\".';echo;sleep 10;exit 142"

Installing Docker

# Install Docker CE
dnf config-manager --add-repo=https://download.docker.com/linux/centos/docker-ce.repo
dnf install docker-ce -y
systemctl start docker
systemctl enable docker
systemctl status docker


# Install Docker Compose

dnf install -y curl

curl -L https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/v2.5.0/docker-compose-linux-x86_64 -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

docker-compose --version

Installing Git

yum install git

Services I Personally Deployed

I launched 2 instances here - one can serve as a US proxy, while the other can be used to deploy alist/telegram bot services

Final Thoughts

• Oracle Cloud console is really difficult to use - Tencent Cloud is much better by comparison, but hey, it’s permanently free
• For example, the Oracle machine I launched here also works decently as a proxy for accessing openapi and other services

Related Documentation

• How to Install Docker and Docker Compose on Oracle Linux 8