The easiest is to follow Oracle’s official post “Launching Your Own Free Private VPN In The Oracle Cloud“, which uses a pre-built OpenVPN image from the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. The image offers 2 free VPN connections bundled with OpenVPN Access Server(A web admin panel to manage users, a separate product offered by OpenVPN).

The above solution works fine if you plan to run the VPN service on a dedicated VM instance and happy to have 2 free users; For me, they are too restrictive so I went with another solution, i.e. run the server without Access Server and create user certificates on demand.

The steps to set up OpenVPN server and configure certificate and iptables are quite complex, fortunately I found a script that helps automate most of the parts. Below are the steps:

1. Github repo: https://github.com/Nyr/openvpn-install and follow its prompts. This is a good article on some details about this script.
2. The script asks your VM ip address and configures server’s CA, server key and certificate as well as clients’ key and certificates. After you finish your first client, just run the script again to add other clients. If you’re interested in all detailed steps it does, refer to this post
3. You will also need to configure Oracle’s network to allow ingress on UDP 1194
4. The script will package an ovpn file that you can import on any OpenVPN client(PC, Apple, Android)
5. For some reason, I had to add the following two entries in the client.opvn file so that my client can use the Google’s DNS 8.8.8.8

Luckily I found Oracle Cloud is providing Arm-based A1 4-cores CPU + 24G memory on its “always free tier”, this seems irresistible so a journey started!

Provisioning a free VM on Oracle Cloud was very easy, in fact during my try, I created, destroyed, recreated several VMs, all went smoothly within short period of time, a great thanks to Oracle here.

I spent about two days and at the end, moved this blog site to a much faster dedicated VM, plus a fully functioning email server(which was always problematic when the site was with my old hosting provider). Very happy for less money (only need to pay for domain registration) and lighting speed.

Below are my notes for my work and I encourage everyone like me to consider this option.

• Provision a free tier VM at Oracle Cloud
• SSH Key configuration https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/GSG/Tasks/creatingkeys.htm
• Configure its network to allow ingress for port 80, 8083(used by Hestiacp), 443, 25,110,143,465,587, 993,995 (for email)
• Any question from the above two steps, refer to this article https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/developer-tutorials/tutorials/wp-on-ubuntu/01-summary.htm
• Configure you DNS entries on your Domain Provider. Make sure the following entries are added. hcp.aus800.com.au is the Hestiacp console

• Install Hestia This is a tool similar to cPanel which helps you configure domains, email and install WordPress
• Configure domain
• This is the video I referred the most
• bash hst-install.sh --interactive no --email help@aus800.com.au --password YourPassWordHere --hostname hcp.aus800.com.au -f
• v-add-letsencrypt-host
• Migrate WordPress site from my old provider to this VM After the above, you should have the new WordPress running on your new VM. I used UpdraftPlus to backup my old site and restore to the new site. My existing All-in-One WP Migration plug-in requires paid version to handle content size > 50M but UpdraftPlus offers free for unlimited file size. In my opinion, UpdraftPlus is worth buying as it offers a lot of backup strategies if you want to protect your content.
• Configure Email, including SMTP. I mainly following this video
• Note SMTP relay service is needed as otherwise you won’t be able to send emails to outside world from the VM. I used Sendinblue as suggested in the above video.
• Also in order to receive emails, you need to enable SMTP port 25 as Ingress in firewall setting as otherwise outside mail servers won’t be able to connect with your mail server.

There is another good video for configuring xrdp so that you can use Microsoft Remote Desktop to log into the VM. It covers network trouble shooting steps which are quite useful. I didn’t enable xrdp as hosting WordPress doesn’t need it.

The challenge is it is not enabled by default in any of available Docker images; I also tried to recompile from source but failed with different kinds of errors.

Just for information, the debugger has its git site where you can find all source code here: https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=pldebugger.git;a=summary

At the end I found a simple solution because the debugger extension is already in Debian’s package repository (https://packages.debian.org/sid/amd64/postgresql-11-pldebugger/download) , all we need to do is to use official PostgreSQL Docker image and then install this extension.

Below is my docker-compose.yml

version: '3'
services: 
  app: 
    build: 
        context: . 
        dockerfile: docker/php/Dockerfile 
    image: ci-docker 
    container_name: tarwis_crm_container 
    ports: 
        - "8080:80"
    volumes: 
       #bind mount app to container folder /var/www/tarwis 
        - ./app:/var/www/tarwis 
    #by defining the same "user defined network", all containers can talk to each other 
    #do NOT use link as it may not be supported in future 
    networks: 
      - appnet 
    environment: 
      #env variables, used by your application
      DB_HOSTNAME: postgres 
      #this points to the postgres db's name 
      DB_DATABASE: yourDBName 
      DB_PORT: 5432 
      DB_USERNAME: yourUserName 
      DB_PASSWORD: yourPassword
  

  postgres: 
    build: 
        context: . dockerfile: docker/postgres/Dockerfile
    image: postgres 
    #when container_name is specified, as 
    #container name is always unique you cannot scale a service beyond 1 container 
    container_name: pg_container 
    restart: always 
    environment: 
        #specify db name 
        POSTGRES_DB: yourDBName 
        #default is postgres but custom it here for clarity 
        POSTGRES_USER: postgres 
        POSTGRES_PASSWORD: hardToGuess 
    ports: 
      - "15432:5432" 
    #by defining the same "user defined network", all containers can talk to each other 
    networks: 
      - appnet 

#definition of all networks
networks: 
  #with default settings (which is a load-balanced overlay network) 
  appnet: 

#no need of volumes

Below is my Dockerfile for the PostgreSQL image, with debugger installed at the end. ( My link above is for PG V11 but V10 exists as well, you can simply change environment variable ENV PG_MAJOR 10 to ENV PG_MAJOR 11)

FROM postgres:10.6 

MAINTAINER YourName@Tarwis Tech 

ENV PG_MAJOR 10 
ENV PG_FULL 10.6 

# Install the postgresql debugger
RUN apt-get update \ && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \ postgresql-$PG_MAJOR-pldebugger 

EXPOSE 5432 

#run below in DB to enable the extension 
#CREATE EXTENSION pldbgapi; 

#reference: 
#https://hub.docker.com/r/codejuggle/postgresql/~/dockerfile/ 
#https://docs.docker.com/engine/docker-overview/#docker-registries 
#https://github.com/docker-library/postgres/blob/2d40c8a89bfc888fb99463e919ac748cd54c0fcc/11/Dockerfile 
#https://gist.github.com/sethbergman/1a34dcf925badee366b46b7c52526701 
#https://github.com/sameersbn/docker-postgresql#enabling-extensions 
#https://github.com/docker-library/postgres/blob/f5a7e06b42aa14cad6edfaeefa676a5312d27618/10/Dockerfile

Run the following commands to build and bring up the containers

docker-compose build 
docker-compose up

Then login to the PostgreSQL instance using PGAdmin, on port 15432(this is re-directed by Docker itself)

In the DB you’re working in, install the extension

CREATE EXTENSION pldbgapi;

Done!

I also installed an mobile app Paperless on my phone so in most cases, I just use my phone to take a photo and upload it into the backend Paperless-NGX, which converts the photo into PDF and does the OCR automatically.

The mobile app Paperless is not very user friendly as in most cases, I have to manually crop photos and it allows one page only; I recently discovered I can use Microsoft Lens to take photos, save them into PDF, then share with Paperless; This completely changed my user experience as now storing files into your computer is just a few clicks away!

Great thanks to Microsoft Lens, app Paperless, and Paperless-NGX, they just made electronic paper archiving easy and pleasant!

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Scan your bank statements using those free apps

Originally published at https://aus800.com.au on May 5, 2022.