Today I decided to get an inexpensive custom domain from Namecheap and try self-hosting Lemmy. A few bucks later I was thinking, “Hey, this is going to be cake.”
I’d read some of the warnings about Oracle Cloud free tier, but figured I’d still give it a shot for hosting. I found a simple how-to for quickly getting an Ubuntu instance spun up with Docker and Portainer. A few minutes later I’m thinking, “This is so easy!”
Then I try to access Portainer using HTTPS and see my first “Your connection is not private,” warning. “No worries,” I think. “Advanced>Proceed. I’m in.”
So I run Lemmy Easy Deploy. “The lights are green, the trap is clean! Boom. Here we go!”
Nothing.
Ports seem to be open on Oracle, but no Lemmy at either 80 or 443.
“Maybe Lemmy is more particular about SSL certificates and such?” I think, for the first time getting worried.
"Err, I think that if I change my nameserver to Cloudflare I can destroy my Lemmy containers, re-run Lemmy Easy Deploy with a Cloudflare API token, and maybe fix it?
Four hours later, after repeatedly starting over, clearing my browser cache every 5 minutes, switching back and forth between nameservers, even deleting the whole Oracle Cloud VM and starting from scratch, I realize that an HTTP connection to port 443 is returning “Client sent an HTTP request to an HTTPS server.”
“Were you there before, message?” I wonder.
Lemmy friends, can you help me? Or am I better off just deleting the VM and giving up the whole idea?
Trying do https://YOUR-DOMAIN-HERE
Now I feel dumb.
That didn’t work earlier.
I just went to copy the error message I saw before and… it’s working.
Maybe because I switched back to Namecheap’s nameserver? Or maybe because I cleared my cache again? Or maybe because I game it some more propagation time?
Or maybe magic?
Each potential reason seems equally likely to me.
Thanks
Welcome to the world of web administration
That was my exact experience too when I first started out.
Things that should have worked didn’t, and things that shouldn’t have worked did
And then eventually the things that should have worked started working, with no clear indication of why they weren’t working, or why they suddenly started working.
All I can say is that it gets easier with time
Edit: **this will make your oci instance less secure **and will break integrations with other oci services. Do not use this in production, but ONLY for testing if the host fw rules affect your app.
I’m currently using oraclecloud for my bots. I work in the space (cloud/systems engg) and the first thing that got me was that the oracle ubuntu instances have custom iptables in place for security.
I’m not sure if it still has, but last i checked a year ago I had to flush iptables before I was able to use other ports. I didint really want to deal with another layer of security to manage as I was just using the arm servers for my hobby.
It might be something worth checking, it isn’t specific to lemmy though.
I found it unintuitive because other major cloud providers do not have any host firewall/security in place (making it easier to manage security using SG/NACL, through the console).
That’s not really the right approach on OCI, unfortunately: if you just flush the rules you also break a lot of their management plane.
You’d want to modify the /etc/iptables/rules.v4 and rules.v6 files to add any rules you want to load on boot (and, of course, if you just flush the rules without saving them, then it won’t persist and a reboot will break things, again).
It’s an arguable benefit: I’m a fan of having the security policies AND iptables sitting between me and doing something stupid, but I also spent most of the last decade dealing with literally thousands and thousands of compromised hosts that just whoopsie oopsed redis/jenkins/their database/a ftp service in a publicly accessible state, got hacked, then had the customer come crying to us asking why we didn’t keep them from blowing their foot off - which, basically, is what the OCI defaults do.
