Hey everyone,

I’ve been deep in the weeds configuring a highly optimized, custom environment on an Oracle Cloud Always-Free VM Instance (the 4 OCPUs ARM, 24GB RAM setup).

While I’ve made great progress solo tuning the kernel and setting up the infrastructure, I realize it would be much more fun and educational to tackle these projects with a like-minded hobbyist collaborator or study partner.

To be absolutely clear: This is not a job or a paid gig. This is strictly a passion project for learning purposes, sharing knowledge, breaking things, and building real-world DevOps/Sysadmin skills.

🛠️ What the instance is currently doing

Right now, I've built a multi-layered sandbox focused on three main pillars:

1. Advanced Network Routing: A custom-routed, obfuscated encrypted network layer specifically hardened to bypass strict DPI filters and network censorship.
2. Automated Infrastructure: An API-driven automation and workflow stack managing background tasks and web ingress.
3. Containerized Game Servers: A fully operational isolated panel environment for deployment and resource tracking of game servers.

Everything has been heavily optimized at the OS level (custom kernel networking tweaks, BBR congestion control, and connection recycling).

🧠 What we’d be doing & learning together

• Infrastructure Hardening: Designing custom firewalls, log rotation policies, and diving deep into sysctlperformance tuning.
• Network Engineering: Messing with policy-based routing (PBR), secondary VNICs, and handling floating IPs.
• Docker Isolation: Managing multi-container environments, tracking microservice constraints, and learning how to debug raw packet drops via tcpdump and ss.

👋 Who I’m looking for

You don't need to be a senior Cloud Engineer! Whether you are a student or a self-taught enthusiast:

• You have a basic comfort level with the Linux CLI (ssh, fundamental file structures).
• You are genuinely curious about cloud networking, security, Docker, or system architecture.
• You want to build cool setups or more ideas to apply and trade knowledge while working through problems.

If you want to team up to build, break, and optimize some complex setups for the pure fun of it, shoot me a DM! I'm happy to share the specific layout, architecture diagrams, and tools I'm using in private chat.

Let’s build something stable together. 🚀