Hackathon - Testing the Environment

This week, technologists from around the world will be participating in a Hackathon in support of the United Nations' Innovation Day. I wanted to spend some time this weekend understanding accounts and access for when we begin hacking in a few days.

Oracle is one of the primary sponsors for the Hackathon in which we've chosen to compete, so I began by getting an Oracle Cloud account, following the instructions in the O'Reilly publication "Getting Started with Oracle Cloud Free Tier." After this, I set up a compartment named "Hackathon," a group called "Fitch" (for my fellow hackers from Fitch) and a single policy that gave all of the members of "Fitch" the right to launch compute instances in the "Hackathon" compartment.

Next, I use the "Users" feature under "Identity" to grant access to each of my fellow team members. However, there is some complexity... I wanted to do this without attaching to emails, and yet it let me use simple single-word usernames. Surely the single word usernames I chose must've been taken, so - what is going to be the initial login behavior for these users?

This caused me a bit of struggling, but the answer appeared to be two-fold. First, one needs to share a login link that goes to the specific tenant - in this case, that is my overall account. Second, one needs to expand the collapsed "Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Direct Sign-In" section at the bottom of the shown form and use that, rather than the username/password shown immediately on the next form.

If you give an email for the sub-accounts you're creating, the users will get a direct email that takes them to a login page for the relevant Tenant's login page.

After this, I tried to create my first compute resource under my first sub-account, but it said I needed the ability to manage a cloud network. After a little digging, I was able to figure out that this required the "manage a cloud network" policy being attached to the group with all my users in it. This allowed me to launch the instance, but how to log into it?

I downloaded the private key and noted the private IP of my first new instance, but - no luck. What username should I use, I wondered?

It turns out that you have to use the username "opc". Once you are in, you can change to root with "sudo su -".

Alright... if we know how to create accounts and create instances - I think we've got what we'll need to get started in a few days!