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Oracle Cloud deleting active user accounts without possibility for data recovery

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Re: Oracle Cloud deleting active user accounts without possibility for data recovery

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I have a free-tier ARM VM, and it's great as a remote Nix builder for aarch64. If I lost it, I'd just have to do building locally.

When did you manage to get that? I tried signing up for the ARM server several times but it always says it's unavailable at the moment in my region (East - Toronto) and I should try a different region... however you can't switch regions after you set up your account. I talked to their support and they said it's unavailable for the foreseeable future... choose a different configuration. Are people still able to provis…

From what I can tell you need to be lucky. When I register my (European) account there are ARM resources left and they were easy to claim. I think I was lucky because they just expanded a data center somewhere nearby, though, I think there was info about it on a Reddit post somewhere.

I don't think the forever-free tier allows cross region instances. You may just need to register an account in another region where they have more resources, but it's anyone's guess where Oracle still has them.

It's a neat playground but as should be blatantly obvious it's not worth investing too much time into, because they can make it disappear without recourse for no reason without warning.

Re: Oracle Cloud deleting active user accounts without possibility for data recovery

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, what products have gotten worse under Oracle? How do they compare to their competitors? Why don't people leave Oracle if it is so bad? Remember, people can and do move platforms all of the time. A good example is how the cloud took off despite the huge amount of work it takes to move things to the cloud. My main point is saying one of the largest software companies in the world is "bad" or "makes things worse" sa…

I think most people feel like the Sun Microsystems products all got worse after the Oracle purchase. E.g., Solaris, Java. It's prolly gonna be hard to find any specific metrics to show that, though. But I remember everyone thinking that all of the Sun offerings had gotten worse after the acquisition. And OpenSolaris got axed altogether, of course. And Java had a series of security embarrassments.

> I think most people feel like the Sun Microsystems products all got worse after the Oracle purchase. E.g., Solaris, Java.

Licenses apart - Java actually improved, but Oracle's name is so tainted that a lot of people ran for the hills the moment they acquired Sun. Solaris support on a lot of platforms used by my employer simply vanished within 36 months (in enterprise terms, that's instantaneous) because every customer started working on a migration/exit strategy as soon as they learned of the acquisition. Once a critical mass of customers was headed out, it got dropped as a platform by a lot of developers, and eventually Oracle itself put it on life support.

So yes, Oracle's name is THAT powerful it can kill you by association. Lawnmower story etc.

Re: Oracle Cloud deleting active user accounts without possibility for data recovery

#63
Reminds me of some months back Google accidentally deleted a very big customer and it took them a week to restore them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40304666

EDIT: I originally said "they" which in the context would be read as "Oracle". My mind was confusing Google and Oracle, in part because of the common element of Thomas Kurian

Re: Oracle Cloud deleting active user accounts without possibility for data recovery

#66
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been many times where I have tried to warn people on HN not to get into bed with Oracle.[0][1][2][3] But people have a hard time resisting free stuff. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33199750 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38075210 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34503883

You had a bad experience with Oracle and I get that. They didn't treat you well. However, not everyone has a bad experience with them and a lot of companies make mistakes and treat customers poorly. The question is not did it happen, the question is how often does it happen and how does the organization handle it. If Oracle has millions of customers and you are the only one they harmed, they are probably doing great.…

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Re: Oracle Cloud deleting active user accounts without possibility for data recovery

#67
post #9

Perhaps related to this? https://www.reddit.com/r/oracle/comments/1hsjxz9/oci_what_ac...

Interestingly enough, I initially thought so too! I have received several E-Mails, skimmed through them, and then when my account was gone I first thought “Oh, I've ignored the 'Final Warning' E-Mails for too long and now they've nuked my account” but now! That's (sadly) not the case.

I know this for two reasons: First of all, I manage two separate Oracle Cloud Accounts (one for a different person). The second one wasn't nuked, despite both using the same cloud computer and being created on the same day.

Second, I have MFA enabled since day one. I logged in many times, before, during, and after these E-Mails bombarded me. They never applied to me as my security policies were already like the mails requested!

So, sadly. It has nothing to do with Oracle enabling MFA. Especially because I'm not stuck at an MFA screen, but because they disabled my account and support said it was deleted, without notice or warning, and they can't tell me why and there's also nothing they could do.

Re: Oracle Cloud deleting active user accounts without possibility for data recovery

#68

Sorry for my bad english its my third language My experience was quite roller coaster with oracle, i have to mention im a student and wanted to try their free tier so i could learn more about enterprise cloud hosted VM’s and networking, signup was good for me, but when i tried selecting an arm instance it would be always out of capacity, and i mean i was on oracle from around 2022 until 2024 first half maybe?, i chec…

Their cloud management and firewall situation is quite terrible. Not any better or worse than AWS or GCP or Azure, but still quite terrible.

It's actually quite neat for large deployments with thousands of containers so you don't need to manually interact with a billion firewalls by just generating all the cloud settings automatically, but for the free trial stuff you're going to need to brute force the security settings web interface until you've checked enough boxes to allow traffic on all ports.

As for the 2FA thing, IMO any cloud company like Oracle should enforce that. Companies get stuck with giant bills all the time because someone got into their cloud accounts and started spinning up crypto miners like crazy.

Jumping straight into the unnecessarily complicated world of Big Cloud seems like a challenging way to begin learning about servers, you'd probably be better off renting a small VPS somewhere instead. Or running a server in your home network, that'll also work just fine at first!

Re: Oracle Cloud deleting active user accounts without possibility for data recovery

#69
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was caused by a bug they wouldn't have told him "you have no future with oracle" and that he couldn't create a new account -- they would have just created a new account, apologized, and given him a few months credit.

It on the Terms of Service, it said customers are only eligible to sign up once. Which sounds like something in the terms of service. They didn't say you're banned from using the service but instead said people are only eligible to sign up once.

Here's the interesting part: I have two Oracle Cloud accounts (one under a different name, basically made by a different person and I just manage it). That other account runs a Fediverse instance, basically a social network where images and posts are “federated”, which could practically mean ANY content, including the illegal kind.

If that account was nuked for disobeying the terms of service, I would've somehow understood the reason. Most likely because some CSAM was uploaded which was federated to my / Oracle's servers.

However, that server and account wasn't deleted. Only my account, which simply had a Nextcloud instance on it, was deleted in this strange way. Now, technically you could also host horrible stuff on Nextcloud, however I am VERY certain this isn't the case. Additionally, I think they'd need to tell me if that was the reason?

Everything about this is so strange.

Re: Oracle Cloud deleting active user accounts without possibility for data recovery

#70

Oracle probably has the best sales team in the industry. No developer ever suggests an oracle product as the tool of choice, yet here they are. We learned when we switched away from Oracle DB due to performance issues. We were told that we needed to get back on it immediately. Our contract required all tools to use Oracle DB and we had to consult with their rep when making upgrades. So yeah, it's entirely your fault.…

Haha, funnily enough this is my fault. Before I began using oracle many years ago, someone had this happen to them. I thought “This will never happen to me. They must've done something wrong and aren't willing to admit it.” Well, here we are.
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