Creating an Oracle Database Vagrant box

Oracle recently launched a new GitHub repository for providing people with Oracle software inside Vagrant boxes. If you have ever setup an Oracle database inside a VirtualBox VM, whether it is as your sandbox environment, to explore Oracle database, or to use it as a full-on development environment, things have just gotten a lot easier for you. With Vagrant, you can now provision an Oracle database inside VirtualBox in a matter of a couple of simple steps.

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Database Requirements for Modern Development

A while ago I wrote a paper talking about what key capabilities databases should provide for today’s software development world. The title of the paper is “Database Requirements for Modern Development“. It got published originally on the Oracle Technology Network and I just republished it here on my website. You can find it under: https://geraldonit.com/articles/database-requirements-for-modern-development/

Creating an Oracle REST Data Services Docker image

Oracle has added Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) to the Docker build files family on GitHub, which means that you can now easily dockerize ORDS. If you don’t know yet what ORDS is, it’s a free technology from Oracle that allows you to REST-enable your Oracle databases. More specifically, with ORDS you can just fire off regular REST calls to modify or retrieve data from one or many Oracle databases without having to know how to write SQL; not that knowing SQL is a bad thing! 🙂 In modern application and microservices architectures REST has become more and more popular for exchanging information. ORDS enables you to easily exchange data from and to Oracle databases via REST without having to write lines and lines of code yourself. For more information on what ORDS is and what it can do, check out Jeff Smith’s blog post about ORDS.

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Enabling SFTP-only access on Linux

Recently I had the need to share a zip file with a bunch of people that was big enough not to fit into email anymore. So I wanted to get it onto my server so that folks could grab it via SFTP from there. SFTP is setup by default on my Linux environment, so them accessing the machine was trivial. However, I didn’t want to give them full access to the entire machine where they could randomly up- and download files anywhere. What I needed was some way of giving them a user which was self-contained, with no SSH privileges and bound to a single location on the filesystem. Luckily, setting something like this up was much easier than I thought, and here is how you can do it yourself. Note, all commands below are executed as the root user:

tl;dr

useradd <your sftp user> -s /sbin/nologin -M
passwd <your sftp user>
1. Enter your sftp user password and confirm
vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Match User <your sftp user>
   ChrootDirectory <your sftp user directory>
   ForceCommand internal-sftp
   AllowTcpForwarding no
   X11Forwarding no

service sshd restart

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Deploying a Kubernetes cluster with Vagrant on Virtual Box

Oracle has just included Kubernetes support for its VirtualBox Vagrant GitHub repository. With that it’s now easier than ever to get a Kubernetes cluster up and running inside VMs. If you have not come across Vagrant yet, it’s a great tool by HashiCorp for “Development Environments Made Easy“.

tl;dr

Install VirtualBox
Install Vagrant
Clone the GitHub repository git clone https://github.com/oracle/vagrant-boxes
Change into the vagrant-boxes/Kubernetes folder
Run vagrant up master; vagrant ssh master
Within the master guest, run as root: /vagrant/scripts/kubeadm-setup-master.sh
You will be asked to log in to the Oracle Container Registry
Run vagrant up worker1; vagrant ssh worker1
Within the worker1 guest, run as root: /vagrant/scripts/kubeadm-setup-worker.sh
You will be asked to log in to the Oracle Container Registry
Repeat the last 2 steps for worker2

Your cluster is ready!
Within the master guest you can check the status of the cluster, as the vagrant user, e.g.:

kubectl cluster-info
kubectl get nodes
kubectl get pods --namespace=kube-system

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