As you might know, this blog is currently posted on Oracle Cloud. This is one of the few (the only?) service that still provides free hosting for a virtual machine with some generous bandwidth (and no credit card required at sign up).

The only issue that I really ran into was with the firewall on the virtual machine. It appears that iptables is set up to deny all incoming connections default but ssh. I am not really sure why tis is the default, but it makes it confusing to connect to the virtual machine.

This stackoverlow answer has the solution on how to flush the default iptables setup to allow all incoming connections.

I then set up ufw to only allow connections on certain parts.

Here is the script I am using:

#!/bin/bash

iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT
iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
iptables -F

iptables --flush

ufw enable

By the way, there is also a network firewall that it is set up through Oracle Cloud’s website, so I am not sure what the iptables defaults really do in this case.