Oracle Cloud - How to avoid inactivity cancellation

josephf

What is the best or easiest method to avoid an inactivity cancellation from Oracle Cloud, without having to actually use the service on a regular basis?

huntercop

To prevent Oracle Cloud from deactivating idle servers in their free tier, you can set up a simple automation to periodically perform a lightweight task on the server. This can include scheduling a cron job, setting up a basic script. This activity will help to keep the server active and prevent it from being considered idle.

giang

Why would you want a free VPS and let it inactivity?

saf31

aRNoLD

install qbt and keep it running for a couple of days per week?

shruub

@giang said:
Why would you want a free VPS and let it inactivity?

(Even)Low(er)EndIdiling

regardless, you might as well run a tor relay/bridge or an i2p node or somethinf

k4zz

@shruub said:

@giang said:
Why would you want a free VPS and let it inactivity?

(Even)Low(er)EndIdiling

regardless, you might as well run a tor relay/bridge or an i2p node or somethinf

Run snowflake!
https://snowflake.torproject.org/

niranjan

If it's just layi hai around you can give it to someone else.

dosai

Upgrade to PAYG.

jmaxwell

Run Yabs on cron

loay

Install Kasm workspaces, it works great as a testing and desktop machine

chihcherng

I execute a shell script that resembles the following:

while true; do
nice cat 100MB_file | nice gzip -c --best > ~/100MB_file.gz
sleep 10
done

BruhGamer12

I run Folding @ Home on mine which maxes out the cpu @ 100% 24/7 - been running for a few months.

MallocVoidstar

I do weekly backups using one of them as a target. Never received an idle warning, running since mid-2021.

farsighter

@chihcherng said:
I execute a shell script that resembles the following:

while true; do
nice cat 100MB_file | nice gzip -c --best > ~/100MB_file.gz
sleep 10
done

I'm wondering what impact will nice command have on an idling VPS.

bloodyprince

https://github.com/layou233/NeverIdle/blob/master/README_en.md

titus

@giang said: Why would you want a free VPS and let it inactivity?

IDLE means something different to me and to Oracle. For example, I running some IRC related processes (ZNC, eggdrop, etc). I use it day by day. But this processes usually make very low traffic & system usage. I think, it's not IDLE, but sometimes Oracle's system say this.

When I first time received this notification, not really understood. "Hey, I not overuse their free resources", and I will get "penalty"? After that I started to use more processes, and generated some extra "fake" traffic.

huntercop

Same post on LES. I like the answers there better, more than mine as well.

Upgrade to pay as you go and stay within free tier. You don’t get changed. Smart and simple but not for everyone I guess.

Gloft

I use stress-ng running on a cron job
This example cron job would stress 4 cores at 18% usage for 10m every day:
0 0 * * * stress-ng --cpu 4 --cpu-load 18 -t 10m >/dev/null 2>&1

yoursunny

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/null
Never had a problem, until I rebooted the machine and forgot to run this.
There goes my 4C24G in Tokyo.

dosai

Btw, you also need to login to their portal once in a while.

Kris

Run a GlobalPing node via docker.

josephf

@dosai said:
Btw, you also need to login to their portal once in a while.

What's the minimum frequency required to login to avoid cancellation? They'll cancel for not logging in even if you have an active service running?

josephf

@huntercop said:
Upgrade to pay as you go and stay within free tier. You don’t get changed. Smart and simple but not for everyone I guess.

Is there any reason someone might not want to take this approach?

martheen

@josephf said:

Is there any reason someone might not want to take this approach?

Without upgrading, any paid resources are simply unavailable, no risk of accidentally enabling it or going over a limit (though to be fair, currently the only viable way to go over this without explicitly allocating additional resource is by transferring over 10 TB in a month, which would be an achievement in itself)

huntercop

@josephf said:

@huntercop said:
Upgrade to pay as you go and stay within free tier. You don’t get changed. Smart and simple but not for everyone I guess.

Is there any reason someone might not want to take this approach?

Some people don’t want to accidentally provision resources they have to pay for. Cannot happen if you don’t upgrade.

chihcherng

@farsighter said:

@chihcherng said:
I execute a shell script that resembles the following:

while true; do
nice cat 100MB_file | nice gzip -c --best > ~/100MB_file.gz
sleep 10
done

I'm wondering what impact will nice command have on an idling VPS.

It will not interfere with the CPU resources required for my primary tasks.