Then what, pray tell, led to the sudden inspiration to create a new blog yesterday all of a sudden? Quite simply put, it was some random reddit discussion, that I’ve already lost. I often read up on the state of ARM servers. It’s an architecture that’s come a long way since powering the “toy” devices I fondly remember from when I was a kid, such as my old Dell Axim. To see it powering a “real” computer, like the MacBook Pro I’m currently writing this on, has been quite a journey. And I think my childhood memories lead me to root for what was once this underdog, to fulfill some dream of my childhood devices having “grown up” much like I have. While in one of these discussions, someone had mentioned Oracle Cloud’s free tier. Now I’m probably not as well-read on these events as I’d like to think I am, since I honestly had no idea Oracle was even a cloud provider. I use AWS at work, but avoid it for any personal project due to the fact that it seems to be the most expensive player in the game. For a personal project of mine that I’ve shelved and unshelved multiple times over the past couple of years, I use Google Cloud. Mostly sitting idle on there, it costs me about $40 a month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maybe the fact that it’s such an underdog that I wasn’t even familiar with it is exactly why<\/em> Oracle offers such a generous free tier. Of particular interest to me was their compute offerings. They offer two AMD-based boxes, each with one virtual CPU and 1GB of RAM, free forever. Much more interestingly, they offer an ARM-based box with up to four virtual CPUs and 24GB of RAM, also free forever (though it’s a bit harder to get your hands on – more on that later). It’s also a bit “higher-tier” in general – here’s a speed test result from the AMD instance hosting what you’re reading now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I got started yesterday by signing up for my free account, then slowly navigating OCI’s somewhat cumbersome web UI. I then attempted to spin up the ARM-based holy grail that I was seeking out – to no avail. I tried tweaking my settings over and over, only to receive availability errors each time. Finally giving up, I attempted to spin up one of the AMD-based instances to see if those would actually work. Work, they did. However, my next actions also ran into issues. Given that managing a Linux web server tends to be a bit cumbersome without some sort of tooling – think cPanel from ye olde days, my next goal was to install some kind of web-based admin panel on the thing. After many failed attempts with many panels, and having to trash the server over and over again, I then made a realization. I have two of them. Maybe I can take advantage of this. So I then established one of them as a “dev environment” where I can try things out and trash as necessary, while only bringing things over to my main environment as they’re ready. With this in mind, I eventually managed to get the Hestia Control Panel<\/a> set up on the dev box. Except for some reason, it would hang indefinitely and not load. Eventually I realized it’s probably a firewall issue. Fortunately, I eventually located a solution<\/a>. Okay cool. I have my dev box, and I now have some good tooling to manage it with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Next up, how should I best go about installing WordPress on it? Turns out it has a built-in installer for several common software packages, with WordPress being one of them. I tried, and failed at first, to use this function. After doing much additional research, it turns out that the built-in admin account has several limitations. I’d created my own account, but in an attempt to be able to manage the default site it created from it, I’d changed several settings. The relevant one here was I’d assigned the It seems like WordPress has changed a lot in the years since I’ve used it last. I tried and failed to rescue my old theme, and, failing that, chose to just go for a new-ish look. I eventually landed on the Spacious theme I’m using now, with a large number of customizations. It feels familiar, yet different. And here we are! It feels good to be back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Oh, right. What of the ARM box I’d originally sought out? I randomly tried again to create it tonight. No luck. I tried another availability domain, fully expecting it to fail again as it had the night before. Except I was then greeted with the typical provisioning processing screen – success! As I’ve already indicated, I’m not hosting this site on it. It’s kind of overkill for my humble personal nonsense. But I’ll probably use it for other fun, random endeavors. It seems like it certainly packs a punch at least!<\/p>\n\n\n\n So I’ve got some new toys, and they’ve cost me absolutely nothing. Hopefully if you’re reading this, you can find some inspiration for your own setup here. And hopefully in the coming days, I can find the inspiration to actually post more stuff here. I’ve got this space – I’d may as well use it, eh?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hey. It’s been awhile, hasn’t it? Well, to put things short, some lowlife ransomware scammer got to my old server, and I was pretty lazy about backups at the time, what with everything else going on in my life. And<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/justindaigle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/justindaigle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/justindaigle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/justindaigle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/justindaigle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/justindaigle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49,"href":"https:\/\/justindaigle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions\/49"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/justindaigle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/justindaigle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/justindaigle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.speedtest.net\/result\/c\/17451492-9ebf-4cca-8d03-be9c03d4da5a.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nsystem<\/code> package to it, which essentially makes it act like the built-in admin user. Once I removed this setting, I was able to run the WordPress install pretty effortlessly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.speedtest.net\/result\/c\/18a302a2-2dc9-46c1-b7ea-52d9f597fbf4.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n