An Oracle White Paper July 2014
Oracle Linux and Oracle VM Remote Lab User Guide
Contents
Introduction ... 1
Infrastructure Requirements on the Client Side ... 2
Overview of the Lab Hardware ... 3
Logging In and Getting Around ... 3
Usage Guidelines ... 6
Support ... 7
Summary ... 7
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Introduction
Welcome to the Oracle Linux and Oracle VM remote lab. This lab allows you to remotely login to Oracle hosted x86 and x86_64 machines running Oracle Linux or Oracle VM to certify your applications in a timely manner.
We expect this program to be tremendously beneficial to ISVs who would like to certify their applications on Oracle Linux and/or Oracle VM. By providing access to industry standard hardware running relevant releases of Oracle Linux and Oracle VM, we expect that the certification process will be simplified and shortened.
This document should serve as a guide for the Oracle Linux and Oracle VM remote lab
users.We assume basic understanding of the Linux operating system and familiarity with Linux package installation.
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Infrastructure Requirements on the Client Side
To access the lab remotely, users need to install following software on the client side. As a rule, we only provide access to the lab through Secured Shell (SSH) clients. There are a number of open-source and publicly available tools that allow SSH tunneling reliably on both Windows and Linux operating systems. We have tested our lab with the following tools, however, other tools will probably work as well:
1. PuTTY is a simple SSH client that is open-sourced and easy to use. You can download PuTTY from http://www.putty.org/. For Linux OS, most of the distributions come packaged with a default SSH client. This client should work just fine when connecting to the remote lab.
2. Secured FTP client (SFTP) that can be used to get data in and out of the lab machines. PSFTP client at the following URL should work fine for this purpose:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
3. TightVNC is a remote desktop management software that is typically a good tool if you expect to set up a full desktop on the lab machine. TightVNC is available at
http://www.tightvnc.org/. There is some additional set up (details below) required to tunnel TightVNC over SSH through PuTTY. If you do not need a full desktop (and can work with just the xterm interface), then there is no need to install TightVNC.
4. If you need VNC set up and have already installed TightVNC and PuTTY, you need to make TightVNC work with a secured SSH tunnel. The following article provides step- by-step instructions on achieving this: http://www.vanemery.com/Linux/VNC/vnc-over- ssh.html
Once you install these tools, you are ready to connect to the Oracle Linux and Oracle VM remote lab. Please make sure that you have tested the above tools and they are working correctly before proceeding further.
NOTE:
Although tools listed below should work on both Windows and Linux (assuming right platform binaries are installed), we understand that Linux users often use the SSH client that comes pre-packaged with the Linux distributions. We do not anticipate any problems with the use of Linux SSH in place of PuTTY. However, the steps to tunnel VNC over Linux SSH will be different. Refer to https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Tightvnc (section titled “Securing VNC Server by SSH Tunnels”) for more details.
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Overview of the Lab Hardware
Oracle Linux and Oracle VM remote lab has hardware with sufficient capacity (CPU, memory, disk) to support many ISV certification activities concurrently. From the software perspective, we provide Oracle Linux 5.x and 6.x kernels with Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) running directly on the hardware or as a dom0 kernel in Oracle VM 3.x. Although majority of the machines are running the latest versions of Oracle Linux, we can easily reconfigure existing machines to a required OS version if such a need arises.
Users should also have sufficient infrastructure on the server side to edit, compile and run their programs/applications. It is the user’s responsibility to install new packages, if required.
Logging In and Getting Around
The hostname for the allocated lab machine will be provided to the ISV based on the
availability of the machines at that point in time. For this discussion, however, let’s assume that the name of the machine is “isvlab1.oracle.com.” Also note that the environment allocated can either be bare-metal Linux or Oracle VM depending on the initial ISV request.
1. Open PuTTY. Under the “Session” tab, type the host name of the machine – isvlab1.oracle.com. Note that for SSH connections, port number must be 22. See Figure 1 below for the basic connection settings. Click “Open” to initiate the connection.
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Figure 1 - PuTTY Basic Connection Settings
2. Once the connection has been established, you will see a terminal asking for the login information. Login as a “root” user. Password will be provided to you at the time of the engagement. See Figure 2 for the screenshot.
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Figure 2 - Logging In
3. At this time, you have complete control of the system. You can create your own directory structure to upload your applications using PSFTP and start compiling and running your program.
4. If you need full desktop setup, then initiate the VNC server on the lab machine by typing “vncserver” at the Linux prompt.
Figure 3 - Initiating the VNC server
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5. On the client side, initiate the TightVNC session as described in the “Infrastructure Requirements on the Client Side” section. Once the connection is established, you should see the desktop as shown in Figure 4. Note that you must tunnel VNC over SSH to be able to use the desktop.
Figure 4 - VNC desktop
6. We expect that majority of the ISVs would have sufficient environments in place at this time to execute on their application certification. However, if you need additional packages, use the Oracle public yum server (http://public-yum.oracle.com/ ) to get relevant packages for Oracle Linux.
Finally, once you are done with the certification, send an email to [email protected] with the results of the certification.
Usage Guidelines
As described above, ISVs will get root access to the machine during their application certification. The guidelines below will help users utilize the resources effectively:
Do not abuse root privileges – do not download and install things you don’t need for the certification purpose.
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Oracle Linux remote lab machines are to be used for the explicit purpose of application certification. You must not use it for any other purpose.
Do not store or keep any personal and/or confidential information on the lab machines.
Clean up after you are done. Although we clean up the disk and account after each engagement, we do not guarantee that all the ISV-specific information will be deleted. It is your responsibility to clean your data after use.
Do not change the root password. We will generate a new root password after each engagement.
Inform Oracle ([email protected]) regarding:
Your progress, so we know that lab resources are being used effectively
Any problems you may encounter
Completion of the certification
Support
Oracle will ensure that hardware, operating system, and connectivity are adequately established in the beginning of the engagement. However, once you have access to the machine, it is up to you to execute on the certification process.
A fair request for support includes: the machine being unresponsive, kernel crash and any other behavior that requires administration support.
To get support, send an email [email protected].
Summary
Oracle Linux and Oracle VM remote lab is offered to ISVs to certify their application(s) on Oracle Linux or Oracle VM. We are looking forward to working with you, and hope that the environment we have provided is sufficient for a timely certification.
Please do not hesitate to send us your feedback at [email protected] on your certification experience with the remote lab. We will make every effort to make it better for future participants. And finally, do not forget to send us your results so that we can jointly communicate to the customers that your application is now supported on Oracle Linux.
Oracle Linux and Oracle VM Remote Lab User \
Guide July 2014
Author: Oracle Linux Alliances
Oracle Corporation World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA 94065 U.S.A.
Worldwide Inquiries:
Phone: +1.650.506.7000 Fax: +1.650.506.7200 oracle.com
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