tf-oci-arm

Oracle Cloud has a generous Always-Free tier that includes a 4 CPU, 24 GB RAM, 200 GB disk, arm64 vm.

Network limits are very very very generous.

Oracle Cloud also has managed terraform (called Stacks).

this repo

This terraform + cloud-init project creates an Ampere VM with a public IP that is fully firewalled on a tailscale network.

The OS image is Ubuntu 20.04.

The cloud-init:

• Bootstraps Tailscale
• Configures SSH using your GitHub public keys (fetched from your username)
• Installs Docker

The Virtual Cloud Network has a Security List that blocks all internet traffic except for tailscale's NAT traversal protocols.

Unfortunately, while NAT gateways are Free, they are not available on Free accounts that do not have a payment method, so I left out the private IP config, which is why the VM still must have a public IP.

pre-reqs

• Oracle Cloud Account
• Tailscale Account
• GitHub Account /w SSH Keys configured

You don't need terraform installed locally, but you could do that. We can use terraform from the Oracle Cloud UI.

deploy

Clone the repo (or fork it):

git clone git@github.com:stealthybox/tf-oci-arm
cd tf-oci-arm

Create a secrets file (it's ignored in git)

cp secret.auto.tfvars.example secret.auto.tfvars

Update the secret values:

1. Update your github_user in the secret.auto.tfvars file
2. Create a Compartment for tf-oci-arm: https://cloud.oracle.com/identity/compartments
   Copy the OCID of your new compartment
   Update the config
3. Create a Tailscale Auth Key: https://login.tailscale.com/admin/settings/authkeys
   Copy the key
   Update the config

Now, create a Stack in Oracle Cloud: https://cloud.oracle.com/resourcemanager/stacks
Upload your folder or zip it up first.
(I have to use a zip personally, because WSL2 browser uploads are limited)

Copy your Compartment OCID into the field again.

Ack your values in the form.

Apply the Stack!

Hopefully it succeeds for you!
It should if you made no changes to the cloud-init and your values are correct.

You should be able to ssh oracle-arm now from any machine with your private keys on your tailnet.

if your local username doesn't match your github user, you'll need to ssh ${GITHUB_USER}@oracle-arm

sudo

Once you're SSH'd in congrats. You can access any port of oracle-arm over your tailnet IP.

You won't have sudo access though because your user doesn't have a password yet.
You can load your passwordhash through cloud-init or setup, NOPASSWD sudo.
For now, I've settled on abusing the docker group to get a root shell to call passwd to manually set my sudo password when I install my tools and shell config:

docker run -it --rm --pid host --privileged justincormack/nsenter1

passwd $(id -nu 1000)
exit

whoami
sudo whoami

remote docker

Want to docker run arm64 containers remotely from your laptop? Try out running NGINX or something:

GITHUB_USER=octocat

docker context create oracle-arm --docker "host=ssh://${GITHUB_USER}@oracle-arm"

DOCKER_CONTEXT=oracle-arm docker run --name nginx -d --rm -p 80:80 nginx

curl oracle-arm

DOCKER_CONTEXT=oracle-arm docker stop nginx

That's a private connection :)

debugging

Very quickly after the terraform Stack succeeds, you should be able to SSH into your VM over tailscale. If not, that's sad, and there's something wrong with your firewall config, or more likely, your tailscale key. Maybe try minting a new tailscale key.

Alternatively, modify the Virtual Cloud Network's "Security List" to allow SSH on tcp/22 via the public IP, so you can login over the internet and debug what's going wrong.

gotchas

If your Oracle Cloud Account is brand-new, you'll get free trial credits and unlimited access to all API's for 30 days. After that 30 days, if you don't add a billing method, your VM will be deleted automatically, and you will lose your files.

You can re-create your VM with your new downgraded Free Account, and it will then persist forever.

If you want to side-step this 30-day ticking time-bomb, you could probably just add a credit card. Maybe you could even then remove it, but I can't test that theory. I'm not sure if there's another way to invalidate the 30-day free credits other than waiting.

An older version of this repo used ufw for the instance firewall instead of the OCI VCN's Security List, but this turned out to be brittle for two reasons:

• 1. It was hard to get the firewalls to stop fighting each other, which made ufw unreliable
• 2. Docker's NAT rules and ufw don't easily fit together if ufw is set to default deny.

I just chose to stop using ufw and start managing the firewall /w terraform, but if you really want to use ufw, you can try to confidently solve problem #1 and use chaifeng/ufw-docker to solve problem #2.

I left the default shell as zsh, sorry. Fork and modify if you like :)

resources

Tailscale has some docs on using the Oracle Cloud firewall + setting up Split DNS https://tailscale.com/kb/1149/cloud-oracle/

This person's entire web log is lovely and they explain Oracle's iptables if you really want to try using ufw: https://www.cflee.com/posts/oci-first-look-2/

This article details some of the oracle cloud service limits: https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2021/09/14/using-oracle-cloud.aspx