Getting started with OIC(Oracle Integration Cloud) for PaaS Admins

The intention of this post is to give an overview on what exactly is OIC and what is expected out from a PaaS Administrator who manages Oracle Integration Cloud. This is first of the series of blog, i will be writing on Oracle Integration Cloud. 

Oracle Integration Cloud is a cloud-based integration platform offered by Oracle that enables businesses to integrate various applications, services, and data sources to streamline their business processes. It provides pre-built integration flows, adapters, and connectors to connect cloud and on-premises applications, databases, and services.

With Oracle Integration Cloud, users can easily create and manage integrations between different systems and automate business processes, such as order processing, customer service, and supply chain management. It offers features such as drag-and-drop integration design, built-in monitoring and error handling, and support for various integration patterns like REST, SOAP, and file-based integrations.

In addition, Oracle Integration Cloud also includes tools for API management, data mapping and transformation, and real-time data synchronization. It allows users to easily build, deploy, and manage APIs, and provides analytics and monitoring capabilities to ensure that APIs are performing optimally.

Oracle Integration Cloud has rich variety of connectors that they offer which also includes connection to other cloud products. This is one of the key differentiator when compared with SOA Suite on the Cloud which is intended for more hardcore developers.

The first step on OIC would be to have access to OCI Console with Administrative privileges and which is also federated with IDCS.

 

it takes 5-10 minutes for provisioning

Once it is in active state, we can get the URL for accessing the Oracle Integration Cloud from the Service Console URL.

How to start/Stop the OIC Instance:-

That's it for this post. In the next post, we will go through on how we can make a sample integrations active and test it. Till then, happy learning cloud.

I hope this post will help someone.....

A Step-by-Step Guide to Troubleshooting OCI Compute Instances Using Serial Console

 The Serial Console allows users to access the system console of a compute instance. Instance console connections should only be used for troubleshooting purposes only. For example, a successful boot is not happening, instance has malfunctioned or someone inadvertently played with the OPC keys. More details can be found under https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Compute/References/serialconsole.htm. In my case, on one fine day, i was not able to login to the instance using the OPC user. The SSH was not happening and i did not have any other choice rather than creating a serial console connection for Linux. I verified all the security lists rules and all seems to be fine at moment. I was getting the network error messages.

Thus, i went ahead and created the serial console connection for the malfunctioned instance.

 

Next, i logged in to an another working instance which was the same subnet as the malfunctioned instance. And under ~ directory, i pasted the content of the key used earlier during console connection to the id_rsa key file(this was converted via puttygen>conversion>export open SSH key(force new file format))

Now, keeping the shell open, reboot the malfunctioned instance. We will see in the shell screen that reboot process are going on. Immediately press the ESC or F5 button until a menu appears.

press ENTER and we will get the below screen

Press Enter and immediately press ESC repeatedly until the next screen comes

Press e and in the section at the bottom add the content init=/bin/bash

Press ctrl-x

At this moment, we are logged into root user and have supersonic powers.:)

[root@localhost .ssh]# /usr/sbin/load_policy -i

[root@localhost .ssh]# /bin/mount -o remount,rw /

[root@localhost .ssh]# cd /home/opc/.ssh

[root@localhost .ssh]# ls -lrt

total 4

-rw-------. 1 opc opc 402 Jan  7 15:25 authorized_keys

[root@localhost .ssh]# cp authorized_keys authorized_keys_bkup

[root@localhost .ssh]#

We could see that someone modified the OPC authorized_keys file and that is the reason, why we were not able to login. Luckily, we have a backup else we had to regenerate the keys content again...

Reverted to the old key file

bash-4.4# cp authorized_keys_bkup authorized_keys

bash-4.4# ls -lrt

total 8

-rw-------. 1 root root 402 Apr 15 11:58 authorized_keys_bkup

-rw-------. 1 opc  opc  402 Apr 15 12:32 authorized_keys

Now, let us reboot the server and try to login to the server again via opc user

Here we are,

We can now delete the console connection from OCI console.

From this activity, we learnt that, we should always have the backup of opc keys. Also for best practice, always have the backup of the boot volume.

I hope this post helps someone. Till then, keep learning cloud.

References:-https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Compute/References/serialconsole.htm#four__maintenancemode