Creating a VM on Oracle Always Free

Posted on October 25, 2019 Updated on October 21, 2019

I’m going to create a new Cloud VM to host some of my machine learning work. The first step is to create the VM before installing the machine learning software.

That’s what I’m going to do in this blog post and the next blog post. In this blog post I’ll step through how to setup the VM using the Oracle Always Free cloud offering. In the next I’ll go through the machine learning software install and setup.

Step 1 – Create a ssh key/file

Whatever your preferred platform for your day to day computer there will be software available for you to generate a ssh key file. You will need this when creating the VM and for when you want to login in to VM on the command line. My day-to-day workhorse is a Mac, and I used the following command to create the ssh key file.

ssh-keygen -t rsa -N "" -b 2048 -C "myOracleCloudkey" -f myOracleCloudkey

Step 2 – Login and Select create VM

Log into your Oracle Cloud Always Free account.

Select Create a VM Instance.

Step 3 – Configure the VM

Give the instance a name. I called mine ‘b01-vm-1‘

Expand the networks section by clicking on Show Shape, Network and Storage Options. Set the IP address to be public.

Scroll down to the ssh section. Select the ssh file you created earlier.

Click on the Create button.

That’s it, all done. Just wait for the VM to be created. This will takes a few seconds.

After the VM is created the IP address will be listed on this screen. Take note of it.

Step 4 – Connect and log into the VM

We can not log into the VM using ssh, to prove that it exists, using the command

ssh -i <name of ssh file> opc@<ip address of VM>

When I use this command I get the following:

ssh -i XXXXXXXXXX opc@XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
The authenticity of host 'XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX (XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX)' can't be established.
ECDSA key fingerprint is SHA256:fX417Z1yFoQufm7SYfxNi/RnMH5BvpvlOb2gOgnlSCs.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added 'XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX' (ECDSA) to the list of known hosts.
Enter passphrase for key 'XXXXXXXXXX': 
[opc@b1-vm-01 ~]$ pwd
/home/opc

[opc@b1-vm-01 ~]$ df
Filesystem   1K-blocks     Used Available Use%  Mounted on
devtmpfs        469092        0    469092   0%  /dev
tmpfs           497256        0    497256   0%  /dev/shm
tmpfs           497256     6784    490472   2%  /run
tmpfs           497256        0    497256   0%  /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda3     40223552  1959816  38263736   5%  /
/dev/sda1       204580     9864    194716   5%  /boot/efi
tmpfs            99452        0     99452   0%  /run/user/1000

And there we have it. A VM setup on Oracle Always Free.

Next step is to install some Machine Learning software.