One of my OCI favorites is finally arrived in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure data center eu-zurich-1 – the possibility to attach one Dynamic Routing Gateway DRG to multiple Virtual Cloud Networks VCNs. To see how it works, Simo has written three blog posts where it’s very well described. Now it’s time to upgrade my existing DRG!

• OCI Dynamic Routing Gateway Attachments Part 1 – Basics | That Finnish Guy
• OCI Dynamic Routing Gateway Attachments Part 2 – Dynamic Route Import Distributions | That Finnish Guy
• OCI Dynamic Routing Gateway Attachments Part 3 – Remote Peering Connections | That Finnish Guy

Oracle’s OCI documentation:

• Dynamic Routing Gateways (DRGs) (oracle.com)

How to upgrade an existing DRG? See here – just click on the images to see the details.

Step 1 – verify on an existing DRG if your region is ready – if yes, press the Upgrade DRG button

As you can see here, in this version of DRG, there is the existing IPSec connection listed.

Step 2 – Do you really want to upgrade the DRG? Sure!

Step 3 – The UI View changes, new Resources are created

After some minutes, the DRG view has changed, now the Virtual Cloud Network attachments are visible. New resources like DRG Route Tables and Route Distributions are created.

Step 4 – What about the existing VPN Tunnel?

Verify if the existing tunnel is still running and try to connect to be sure that the routing work properly. It works – nice!

Summary

To attach a single DRG to multiple VCNS opens new possibilities in network design. Read the manual properly to understand how components like DRG Route Tables and DRG Attachments are working. Well done, well done, Oracle!

For the Trivadis Oracle Enterprise Manager Training, we setup and Oracle EM13c in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. One student exercise is, to setup notification rules. Therefore a mail server is required. In Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, there is an Email Delivery service available which fits best: Overview of the Email Delivery Service (oracle.com)

I have tried to setup a local postfix mail gateway which used the NAT gateway address as sender’s address. But the NAT gateway addresses are blacklisted in spam services like spamhaus.com. Even Microsoft doesn’t want to allow these mails send by the NAT gateway. You can see my attempts at the bottom of this blog post.

Setup

Email Delivery Service Prerequisites

The configuration for this service has to be done as non-federated user.  If you want to use the service as a federated user, you get this message: Email Delivery is not available with your current permissions. Please Contact Support for further assistance.

IAM User

This is why I have created a IAM user called email-delivery-service-user. The user needs these permissions to manage the email delivery service.

SMTP Credentials

Additional a SMTP credential for this user is created. This SMTP credentials are used for Oracle Enterprise Manager EM13c mail server configuration. Identity >> Users >> User Details >> SMTP Credentials. Copy the provided OCID and password temporary for later use.

Email Delivery Service Setup

Login in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure user interface as previous created user to configure the approved sender list. Developer Services >> Email Delivery. Add the mail address what you want to use for OEM communication to the approved sender list. Take care at the policy. Here in this case, the user is only allowed to do it in the O-EM called sub-compartment. Now we are ready to configure the Oracle Enterprise Manager EM13c.

The SMTP server is visible on the Email Configuration page and depends on your region. In my case, the SMTP endpoint in data center Zurich is used: smtp.email.eu-zurich-1.oci.oraclecloud.com.

Oracle Enterprise Manager EM13c – Mail Servers Configuration

In Setup >> Notifications >> Mail Servers, we add a new mail server.

Set the Sender Identity, the Sender’s Email Address corresponds to the entry in the deliver approved sender list.

Oracle Enterprise Manager EM13c – Mail Servers Test

The configuration is done, we can test it. Test Mail Servers – click on the image for more details. After some seconds, you see a confirmation at the top that the test succeeded. Verify your mailbox for the test message. That’s all folks.

Addendum – Spamhaus and Outlook.com

Before I used the Email Delivery Service, the first try was to configure postfix as local mail agent, there is a good manual available here: Oracle Linux: Install the Postfix Email Server. But this was not successful. When I tried to send mails to my companies’ address or to an outlook.com (hotmail.ch is one of them), I always got a SMTP error: Client host [152.67.94.216] blocked using Spamhaus

152.67.94.216 is the public IP address from the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure NAT gateway, first I did a removal request online at spamhaus.org – the URL was provided in the error message. And 2hrs later, I got a message and confirmed my request.

Two things:

1. my company syncs their spam filter on a regular base, so after a while, I was able to send notifications to my personal company mail address
2. but for the Hotmail (Outlook.com) address, it did still not work: Unfortunately, messages from [152.67.94.216] weren’t sent. Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network is on our block list (S3140)

So I tried to contact Microsoft on the same way with a support request:

And some minutes later I git the answer: Not qualified for mitigation.

Summary

This is quite simple: If you are in the cloud – use the cloud services.

This is a small blog post series

Select the plug-in for the database management, press Update to deploy it on the management agent.

Now you see the confirmation that the deployment process is initiated.

After some seconds, you can see on the top right of the agent overview page, that the service plug-in is installed.

More about this process: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Database/Tasks/externalcreating.htm

Connect to the External Database

After registration, the container database is added, but not connected. In this step we create a connector to setup the database in OCI.

Set display name, DNS hostname, port and service first.

The connector type cannot be changed, select the management agent from the connector agent id list, specify database connection credentials. I use the database schema SYSTEM. Click on Connect to External Container Database.

After some minutes, the work request is done and the database is connected. The database is in state Available.

We repeat the steps above to add the three external Pluggable Databases on the same way.

Enable Database Management

Before Database Management from OCI can be used, it has to be enabled. This is done on the page where the external Container Database is visible. According Oracle’s license handling, this has to be done manually. You can select between BYOL and License Included. After some minutes, the database management is enabled and the agent is updated. More about licensing and pricing in the next blog post number 3 which is coming soon.

Summary Part 2

When the Management Agent is up and running, adding a database is straight forward. But we have to clarify the license situation first. More about licensing and cost in the next blog post part 3.

In a previous blog post I wrote how to build a small and secure development environment in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with an OpenVPN entry point and a compute instance in a private setup. Now there is the Terraform code available in GitHub to setup it on an easy and reusable way:

terraform-examples/oci/openvpnas at main · Trivadis/terraform-examples (github.com)

What you get

After executing the code, you will get this setup here:

• an OpenVPN Access Server from OCI Marketplace
• a Compute Instance

Prerequisites

• Oracle OCI CLI installed and configured
• Terraform up and running
• Git client installed

SSH Key Access

An example private and public SSH key to get access on the compute instance in the private subnet is provided in subdirectory SSH, if you want to use your own SSH key – which is highly recommended – just replace the public key variable in file variables.tf with your own key:

Some Code Snippets

Terraform State File

In file backend.tf, the Terraform state is set  to local, there is also an example to store your state file in OCI Object Store. Please prepare the bucket first according the documentation here: Using Object Storage for State Files (oracle.com). Example:

Compute Instance Image

The compute instance as defined in compute.tf uses this images according your location – for other data centers or images, follow here is the link where all images are listed: https://docs.us-phoenix-1.oraclecloud.com/images/

OpenVPN Marketplace Image

Let’s Terraform it

0: Clone GitHub Directory

And go to openvpnas subdirectory.

1st: Set Variables

2nd: terraform init, plan and apply

Login and Go!

And after some minutes – you can get access to the OpenVPN Administrator Dashboard or get your client or profile. All required information like OpenVPN Access Server public IP, URL etc. are provided in the Terraform output.

Login into the compute instance with the private key and the private subnet IP address when the VPN tunnel is up and running:

Links and Documents

• A good point to start: Terraform: Set Up a Simple Infrastructure with OCI Terraform (oracle.com)
• Getting started with the Terraform OCI Provider: Getting Started (oracle.com)
• Hashicorp Documentation: Docs overview | hashicorp/oci | Terraform Registry
• Blog post by Lucas Jellema with the first steps: Very first steps in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as Code with Terraform – AMIS, Data Driven Blog – Oracle & Microsoft Azure

Summary

Setup an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with Terraform is a good way to start in the IaC – Infrastructure as Code – world. Feel free to use this code a base for your next project. What’s your next level? Mine is to integrate the code in the Oracle Cloud Resource Manager – stay tuned!

The OCI Management Agent service collects data from services and sources for monitoring and management in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. In this blog post series I will show you how you can monitor and manage an on-premises Oracle databases in OCI. The communication between an agent and OCI requires an Agent Install Key and is based on HTTPS. Service Plugins extend a Management Agent for example for Oracle database performance monitoring and management or log analytics.

This is a small blog post series

• Part 1 shows the installation of the Management Agent on an on-premises system
• Part 2 describes how to manage this Oracle database in OCI
• Part 3 watches behind the scenes for billing, job execution etc.

Setup for OCI Management Agent

New added agents in the compartment belong automatically to this group. Replace the OCID with the OCID for your compartment.

Policy Datacenter_Kestenholz_Agent_Communication_Policy

[root@bifangstrasse stage]# /opt/oracle/mgmt_agent/agent_inst/bin/setup.sh opts=/stage/input.rsp Executing configure Parsing input response file Generating communication wallet Validating install key Generating security artifacts Registering Management Agent Starting agent... Agent started successfully Agent setup completed and the agent is running. In the future agent can be started by directly running: sudo systemctl start mgmt_agent Please make sure that you delete /stage/input.rsp or store it in secure location.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

[root@bifangstrasse stage]# /opt/oracle/mgmt_agent/agent_inst/bin/setup.sh opts=/stage/input.rsp   Executing configure           Parsing input response file         Generating communication wallet         Validating install key         Generating security artifacts         Registering Management Agent   Starting agent... Agent started successfully     Agent setup completed and the agent is running. In the future agent can be started by directly running: sudo systemctl start mgmt_agent   Please make sure that you delete /stage/input.rsp or store it in secure location.

A systemd service is created.

[root@bifangstrasse stage]# systemctl list-units --type=service --state=active | grep mgmt_agent mgmt_agent.service loaded active running mgmt_agent

1 2	[root@bifangstrasse stage]# systemctl list-units --type=service --state=active | grep mgmt_agent mgmt_agent.service                 loaded active running mgmt_agent

Verify the Management Agent in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Immediately after the setup, the Management Agent is visible with status Active in OCI and starts uploading data.