Monthly Archive: November 2020

Yesterday I decided to cleanup old Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Classic objects. There were a lot of files lying around in the Object Storage of a project from 2018. Cleaning up these files in the OCI console was no option, they can only be deleted one by one. And with over 1500 files, a bad idea. During the search for an option for Object Storage mass deletion, I found this tool: ftmcli – Object Storage Classic File Transfer Manager. The MOS note contains the script and a short manual how to use. It’s a Java based script,  a perfect match for my Windows Subsytem for Linux (Ubuntu), which I often use for OCI actions.

OAC-Classic : How To Delete A Storage Container That has Multiple Objects. (Doc ID 2634021.1)

Link to the User Guide: https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/iaas-classic/storage-cloud/csclr/preparing-use-ftm-cli.html#GUID-5BB8647F-DDAD-4371-A519-1116402245FB

The Container List

Here is the content of my Object Storage Classic what I have to clean up – it contains five containers.

ftmcli – Installation

Over the WSL mountpoint in /mnt where you have access to your local Windows disk drives, transfer the package to the home directory and extract it.

In the extracted subdirectory is a file called ftmcli.properties – there you have to set your OCI Object Storage information. Two parameters are used:

• user=<OCI login>
• rest-endpoint=<your Storage Classic Endpoint>

The Storage Classic Endpoint is visible in the Storage Classic Account tab. There is no need to set the password in the properties file. You are prompted for it when ftmcli is executed.

ftmcli – Commands

Available commands – output from ftmcli:

upload	Upload a file or a directory to a container.
download	Download an object or a virtual directory from a container.
create-container	Create a container.
restore	Restore an object from an Archive container.
list	List containers in the account or objects in a container.
delete	Delete a container in the account or an object in a container.
describe	Describes the attributes of a container in the account or an object in a container.
set	Set the metadata attribute(s) of a container in the account or an object in a container.
set-crp	Set a replication policy for a container.
copy	Copy an object to a destination container.

 

ftmcli – List Object Storage Containers

Here you will be prompted for your OCI password. Curious thing: My existing OCI password what I have used for months contained a lot of special characters( ,LCaOQ3|~[PT”+x), and there were not accepted.

I had to set a new OCI account password with less complexity and special characters and then it worked.

ftmcli – Delete Object Storage Containers

With the -f flag, the deletion of a container which contains objects can be forced. I did it for all my containers.

And finally all containers are removed. Job successfully done!

Summary

This is what I like in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, for a lot of problems and technical questions are a lot of scripts and tools available like this one: ftmcli. But sometimes it’s not so easy to find them.