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Course Preview: Oracle Cloud + Hermes

A quick peek into our premium course.

This 12-Part Video Series will walk you through Setting Up A Free Oracle Cloud VM To Host Hermes Agent

Lesson 1 — Create Free Oracle Account• Sign up for a free Oracle Cloud Always Free account to get started.Lesson 2 — VCN Wizard and Configuration• Configure networking and build a virtual network with Oracle's VCN Wizard.Lesson 3 — Reviewing Your VCN• Inspect CIDR blocks, subnets, gateways, security lists, and route tables.Lesson 4 — Confirming Your VCN is Live• Verify the VCN was created and explore every tab in the networking dashboard.Lesson 5 — Configuring Your Compute Instance• Select A1 Flex, allocate 4 OCPUs and 24 GB RAM, configure SSH keys and boot volume.Lesson 6 — SSH Keys: The Deep Dive• Learn the two SSH key methods — uploading your own vs. Oracle-generated.Lesson 7 — Security Lists: Opening the Right Doors• Allow SSH, HTTP, HTTPS, and Hermes traffic through the subnet-level firewall.Lesson 8 — First Contact: SSHing Into Your Server• SSH into the server for the first time and configure iptables firewall rules.Lesson 9 — Setting Your Server's Hostname• Replace Oracle's auto-generated hostname with a clean, descriptive server name.Lesson 10 — Verifying Your Firewall Rules• Audit iptables rules, check packet counters, and verify end-to-end firewall health.Lesson 11 — Installing Hermes on Your Oracle VM Instance• Download and install Hermes on your newly configured Oracle virtual machine.Lesson 12 — Hermes Setup and Initial Tasks• Configure core settings and launch the Hermes assistant for the first time.

Each lesson contains detailed, expertly crafted instructions that together make up a complete guide on how to build your very own AI agent hosting platform via the Oracle Free OCI Tier.

Our guide provides a step-by-step walk through, covering everything from setting up a free Oracle Cloud server and configuring SSH access to installing the required dependencies — giving you everything you need to host powerful AI agents such as Hermes. From there you can easily SSH into your Oracle Cloud VM and talk to Hermes remotely. By doing this you get access to an extremely powerful, dedicated workspace to process all your Agentic work, freeing up more power and for your main computer. This give you the ability to do all sorts of amazing things.

There is a quiet revolution happening in personal AI infrastructure. For the first time, a production-grade AI assistant — Hermes — can run on a server you completely own, in a cloud environment that costs you absolutely nothing. It’s actually, genuinely free.

Furthermore, this Oracle Cloud server comes stocked with a full Ubuntu operating system, built on top of Linux. This means you and your Hermes agent will have immediate access to an incredible suite of computing, process, and networking tools right right off the bat!

In this course, we show you exactly how to make that happen! From the moment you click “Create Instance” in the Oracle Cloud console, to the moment you SSH into your very own configured cloud server instance that is ready to host Hermes.

Oracle Cloud’s Always Free tier is one of the best-kept secrets in cloud computing. While other providers lure you in with trial credits that expire and surprise bills that arrive weeks later, Oracle gives you a real, always-free A1 Flex instance with 4 OCPUs and 24 GB of memory. That is not a toy. That is a legitimate ARM-based server with enough horsepower to run language models, host web applications, serve APIs, and handle real traffic. This course takes full advantage of those generous limits, maxing out every resource Oracle provides so that Hermes has the best possible foundation. And here’s the best part: from the day you launch your instance, it stays on and running 24/7.

Throughout 12 detailed video lessons, you will learn what a Virtual Cloud Network is and why it exists. You will see how subnets carve IP address ranges out of a larger network block. You will configure internet gateways, NAT gateways, and service gateways — and you will know exactly what each one does. You will set up Security Lists that act as subnet-level firewalls, and then you will configure iptables rules on the server itself for a second layer of defense. By the time you are done, you will not just have a working server — you will have become the networking and security master with a deep understanding of the architecture at play.

This course does not rush. Every concept is explained in plain language before a single command is typed. When we configure SSH keys, you will learn the difference between uploading your own key for maximum security and letting Oracle generate one for convenience — and you will be able to make an informed choice between the two. When we review firewall rules, every column in the iptables output is broken down: what the protocol means, why the source address is 0.0.0.0/0, what a stateful connection is, and why rule order matters for performance. This is not a “just follow along” tutorial. It is a genuine education in cloud infrastructure.

Beyond Hermes, the skills you gain in this course transfer to virtually anything else you might want to run on Oracle Cloud. The VCN you build can host multiple instances. The networking knowledge applies to web servers, databases, game servers, VPN endpoints, or CI/CD pipelines. The firewall configuration patterns — both at the Oracle Cloud Security List level and the host iptables level — are the same patterns used in enterprise environments. Once you understand how Oracle Cloud networking works, you can deploy almost anything.

And getting Hermes installed around running on your Oracle VM will be well worth the effort, as this AI assistant will have high-level control and access to your VM and everything on it. It stays alive, running on your server, ready to processes any instructions you give it. Whether you use it for productivity, creative writing, coding assistance, or simply as a private chatbot, Hermes gives you something that commercial AI services cannot: complete ownership and privacy. Pair that with a free Oracle Cloud server, and you have a dedicated AI powerhouse!

This course is designed for anyone who is comfortable using a computer but has never set up a cloud server or has never done any SSHing into a server. You do not need to be a developer and you do not need to proficient Linux, we will teach you the necessary details and syntax along the way. You do not need to understand networking. Every step is the video guide, along with important details in the text guide that pairs along side the video lessong. If you can follow instructions and type a few commands into a terminal, you can complete this course and walk away with a production-ready cloud server that runs Hermes — at no extra monthly costs!

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