Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Bastion Service Frequently Asked Questions

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  • What is a bastion service?

    A bastion service provides secure shell (SSH) access to your private hosts in the cloud.

  • What is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Bastion?

    Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Bastion service provides restricted and time-limited Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) access to target resources that don't have public endpoints.

  • Is OCI Bastion free?

    Yes. OCI Bastion is free and available for the free tier of Oracle Cloud.

  • Is there a limit on sessions?

    Yes. There may only be 20 sessions per Bastion.

  • Is there a limit on the number of Bastions?

    Yes. There may only be 5 Bastions in each tenancy.

  • Is there a data transfer limit?

    There is no data transfer limit; however the connection speed is limited per the SSH connection to 16 Mbps.

  • Is there a maximum session time to live (TTL)?

    Yes. The maximum session time in 3 hours. The minimum session is 30 minutes.

  • What is the authentication mechanism?

    OCI Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies and SSH key pairs provide authentication.

  • How can a Bastion be deployed?

    Customers can use an SDK, the CLI, Console or the Terraform Provider to provision an external (standard) bastion.

  • Must the target host have Oracle Agent running?

    Managed SSH sessions require that the target resource has both an OpenSSH server and the Oracle Cloud Agent running. Some images have Oracle Cloud Agent already enabled on the Compute instance. Other times, the Oracle Cloud Agent on the instance must be enabled by the user. SSH port forwarding sessions don't require an OpenSSH server or the Oracle Cloud Agent to be running on the target resource.

  • How can you terminate sessions in progress?

    You can delete a session, which will terminate it. This may take up to 5 minutes.

  • Why do I see deleted session(s), but none were actively deleted?

    A session that is expired is shown as deleted.

  • Will OCI Bastions work with MySQL?

    MySQL Database service, ATP, OKE v2, and others use OCI Bastion to reside on private subnets.

  • Can I use OCI Bastions with Security Zones?

    Yes

  • Can I use OCI Bastion with Windows?

    Yes. RDP over SSH, of if using OpenSSH with Windows can SSH to host

  • Is OCI Bastion just a SSH tunnel?

    Yes

  • Do I need a public IP?

    No

  • Do I have to create a new session every time I want to connect?

    Yes, you need to create a new session if the session has expired.

  • Is OCI Bastion available in all regions?

    Yes