I love challenges, and working with Oracle products has always been a challenge for me. This love/hate relationship started ~20 years ago when I could not set up the first version of Oracle Internet Directory, following the documentation word by word! I had to "fix" several scripts to make it install, and in the end, even though it installed, it still wouldn't work... It was the only product I cared enough to remember that failure after so many years. Or maybe, the only product I failed to tame.

I was trying for months to register for Oracle's always Free services to famililarize myself with Oracle Cloud services and products. As I have done with AWS with no fuss. It tried to contact their customer support 4 times and nobody would come on the chat line. Different times too, in order to make sure the timezone is correct. I also tried to get in touch with 2 different Oracle employees that I personally know, before one brilliant guy on customer support informed me that the password should not contain (several but not all) special characters. It was nowhere mentioned of cours, but that was it!

I registered and now I'm playing with it. Do expect more of these posts; Oracle has a tendency to drive me crazy...