[SOLVED] Temporarily hosting on Oracle Free tier.
Solution : Don't be stupid. Open the proper ports.
Hey there!
So, I'm getting ready to move from places to places for the next six months and it's going to be a bit of a hassle. My servers will be offline until I find a permanent home, which is stressing me out because I rely on a bunch of services I host for my daily routine.
So I've set up an Oracle free tier account so I can still access my favorite services while I'm in limbo. I'm using docker and Portainer to manage everything, and so far Serge (for the lolz) and Vikunja are up and running with no issues using the IP Oracle provided.
But when I tried to set up Bookstack, Whoogle and Searxng, they installed fine but for some reason they won't open. I've checked the logs and there are no errors, I just keep getting a timeout message in my browser.
I haven't tested any other services yet, but I'm stumped as to why these two won't cooperate. I'm just a casual hobbyist and not an expert, so if anyone could lend a hand, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks!
First you have the open the ports in the security list assigned to your vm. Then you also have to open the ports with iptables on the vm itself. Took me a while to figure that out:)
I cannot recommend using Oracle.
Ever.
For any reason.
They are malignant, and you will regret this decision.
Been using them for over a year now. I'm not a proud or loyal customer, but it's a very generous free tier and I haven't regretted it.
I tried 5 different credit cards to setup my account and none of them worked for the free tier. Contacted customer support, they simply said "well we can't do anything about it, it's clearly a problem in your end and not ours even though you tried 5 different credit cards to pay for the service".
I've been trying for a year and same results
Not an exper either, but I've used OCI Free Tier for a while and most of the times I was encountering issues they were related either to the fact it was ARM and not x86_64 (most tutorials and guides are not written with ARM CPUs in mind) or to the sort of Firewall built in the Oracle Cloud Platform. Have you already checked if the ports required for the services not working are opened correctly?
You answered while I was editing my post. The fact is that I am not the brightest bulb in the box. I forgot to open the proper ports.
Thanks for your support :)
Ahah dw, it happened to me as well and to be fair the OCI UI for opening ports is not the most intuitive piece of software I've seen...
Can't agree more :)
Take backups, I've heard reports of them randomly shutting everything off and deleting the account.
Frankly, Oracle isn't worth free, but fill your boots.
I got my account closed with no reason a hair after 12 months. It was good while it lasted, and I have the backups outside of oracle's cloud.