Oracle Cloud's Lifetime free services (2 VPS + more)

[Divaksh]

It seems like CPU is shared. 1GB RAM is good but 1/8 is CPU power you get. It can be compared with the shared hosting with dedicated RAM. So, yes good for the personal portfolio with low traffic.

 

[varkey]

Perhaps its worth opening a support ticket if possible to ask why the network throughput is capped at 50 Mbps. I'll see if I can do that.

Edit : Done, ticket opened. Will keep the thread updated once I get a response,

So after keeping the ticket open for 8 days, they said this

Hello XXXXX

Free shapes are throttled at 50MB for internet access and 480MB for internal VCN access. You are seeing expected results. We do not have this properly documented and will work to correct that.

Additionally, free shapes do not qualify for ticket-based support, as such we will be resolving this issue.
https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/faq.html

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Does Oracle Cloud Free Tier include service level agreements (SLAs) and technical support?

Oracle Cloud Free Tier does not include SLAs. Community support through our forums is available to all customers. Customers using only Always Free resources are not eligible for Oracle Support. Limited support is available for Oracle Cloud Free Tier with Free Trial credits. After you use all of your credits or after your trial period ends (whichever comes first), you must upgrade to a paid account to access Oracle Support. If you choose not to upgrade and continue to use Always Free Services, you will not be eligible to raise a service request in My Oracle Support.
##############################################

Cheers
Kevin Miller | Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Customer Operations

 

[royalroy]

Hi, I'm not a cloud infra guy and am still learning. Can anyone here help me with forwarding ports (TCP and UDP) to my compute instance? Seems like Oracle is way different than Azure. I am using Ubuntu on my vm. Thanks.

 

[waterloo_sunset]

@royalroy check OP's post here: Oracle Cloud's Lifetime free services (2 VPS + more) | Technology
Also, add rules in Default Security List under VCN settings on Oracle Cloud portal.

@Rehan Kumar wireguard broke after i ran apt dist-upgrade & reboot on an ubuntu instance yesterday. it connects but doesn't pass any traffic. i tried uninstalling and re-installing with identical script and settings before but it just refuses to work. i found a few threads on other forums about issues after a kernal upgrade and i tried running 'dpkg-reconfigure wireguard-dkms' but that didn't help either.

i am out of ideas and really don't want to set it up from scratch again. can we take snapshots & restore in always free tier? is there anyway to do a full wipe without deleting and creating a new instance?

 

[royalroy]

@waterloo_sunset Thanks. I already figured it out myself. I did open the ports in the first place but thought that the ports weren't open. The server seems to listen on the port but I cannot telnet to my VM on that port. Also, online port checker tools fail to detect an open port (except port 22). Telnet says "No route to host" on all ports (tried from my GCP VM and home connections and a friend's AWS), but successfully establishes a session on port 22 (which I use for the SSH). I have tried allowing all traffic over all the ports but it fails anyway. However, I am running an OpenVPN server on its standard port 1194 and it works fine. Can anyone here guess out why this is happening?

Edit: I also tried telnet to port 1194 after I made sure I could connect to the OpenVPN server but still it fails.

 

[royalroy]

wireguard broke after i ran apt dist-upgrade & reboot on an ubuntu instance yesterday. it connects but doesn't pass any traffic. i tried uninstalling and re-installing with identical script and settings before but it just refuses to work. i found a few threads on other forums about issues after a kernal upgrade and i tried running 'dpkg-reconfigure wireguard-dkms' but that didn't help either.

Seems like I cannot update wireguard with apt update. It fails due to some SSL negotiation error.

 

[Rehan Kumar]

@royalroy check OP's post here: Oracle Cloud's Lifetime free services (2 VPS + more) | Technology
Also, add rules in Default Security List under VCN settings on Oracle Cloud portal.

@Rehan Kumar wireguard broke after i ran apt dist-upgrade & reboot on an ubuntu instance yesterday. it connects but doesn't pass any traffic. i tried uninstalling and re-installing with identical script and settings before but it just refuses to work. i found a few threads on other forums about issues after a kernal upgrade and i tried running 'dpkg-reconfigure wireguard-dkms' but that didn't help either.

i am out of ideas and really don't want to set it up from scratch again. can we take snapshots & restore in always free tier? is there anyway to do a full wipe without deleting and creating a new instance?

iptables rules reset after reboot by default, I would suggest you to re run iptables commands required by wireguard and use

sudo netfilter-persistent save

After running iptables commands so that rules are automatically reloaded after reboot

To open a particular port on oracle cloud, for example to open port 80/tcp

sudo iptables -I INPUT 6 -m state --state NEW -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT

To use udp, replace tcp with udp and 80 with required port, also remember to run sudo netfilter-persistent save

There is a reason iptables resets after every reboot by default, because it's quite powerful and can be dangerous, one wrong command can even block port 22 and lock you out of your VM, which can be solved by a simple reboot of the VM from console.

My original wireguard script also had problems after VM restart but some iptables tweak solved the problem.

I will try to tweak my script to work properly with Oracle cloud and share once it's ready

 

[Rehan Kumar]

Surprisingly, ports which are required to run a mail server are not hard blocked by oracle, which is not very common with free providers

A complete setup like iredmail/mailcow etc will crash due to low amount of ram but a simple mail server works perfectly
Pretty nice to have a free mail server

 

[abbyck]

I wouldn't trust my mails on a free service.
As a fun project, it's good

 

[Navjot Singh]

SMTP ports are usually blocked on all hosts these days.