Submitted 3 weeks ago by starkzarn@infosec.pub to selfhosted@lemmy.world
https://roguesecurity.dev/blog/custom-oracle-image
Decided to write up a quick post on a hacky workaround I came up with for custom distros Oracle free tier and thought I’d share. Don’t rely on Oracle, but definitely do leverage as much of their free compute as you can for non-critical workloads!
Can’t you just kexec and be on your way?
I am not well versed with kexec but I always understood it to be a kernel reboot without power cycling the “metal.” Please enlighten us with an example! I don’t see how you’d replace the entire userspace (and possibly filesystem) with simply kexec.
Kexec can be used to load a new kernel and “reboot” quickly, it can also be used to load a new kernel, an initrd and never touch the disk. Such a system lives completely in ram and allows you to modify the disk in any way you want without breaking you running Linux (which is in ram)
Any distro that has a network boot installer that can be passed to kexec can be installed this way, any that don’t can still kexec any Linux distro and then install any other distro by passing the disk to a VM and installing linux through that.
You can also kexec the netboot.xyz image and get any distro supported there.
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
I did not realize they had a free tier, thanks!
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
They’ve had it for years. It can be difficult to sign up for though.
You get a lot of resources for free, but don’t use them for anything important. They can nuke your account for any reason.
30p87@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
mines crypto
starkzarn@infosec.pub 3 weeks ago
Certainly! As others have said, don’t hang anything worth value on it without an out of band backup strategy, they’re famous for unscrupulously deleting things with no warning. Oracle is a miserable company.
Free is free though!
non_burglar@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I haven’t had my instances deleted, but they do some kind of maintenance blip everyday that my monitoring sees as 3 seconds of downtime, so maybe keep that that in mind.
BlueEther@no.lastname.nz 3 weeks ago
I run my lemmy instance on their free tier, although I do have full account so I can expand for for full backups during upgrade, and also on the pure free tier I couldn’t get all 4 free cores at the closest DC