As many people know, Oracle Cloud has a very generous free tier. If you’re lucky and manage to bag yourself a slot, you can have yourself a 4 core, 24GB of RAM ARM64 VPS for free with up to 200GB of storage and a boatload of bandwidth available.

However, there is a catch… If you’re an idiot and create a VM without the right private keys assigned… That VM is useless. Or if you decide to nixos-infect a server without setting up your root SSH keys first… you can also lock yourself out, ask me how I know…

I recently had the joy of upgrading an old server from Windows Server 2012 R2 to 2016. This server was supposed to be decommissioned over a year ago and recent efforts to try and remove this server resulted in more and more pushback from users… So this weekends project was to get this ageing, out of support, out of warranty, spinning rust server into the “modern” age of an OS from 10 years ago.