ZSystems/Community cloud access

NOTE: This guide previously assumed that LinuxONE instance creation is done/handled via IBM. This is no longer the case. It's been handled/maintained by Marist college for quite some time now.

NOTE #2: You can only get temporary instances that "last" for 120 days via the approach outlined here. In case you need a permanent instance (one that won't be deleted after 120 days), please contact Sarah-Julia Kriesch.

• open the LinuxONE Community Cloud home page in a web browser (successfully tested with Chromium, but Firefox/Librewolf or other Chromium-/Firefox-based browsers will most likely work as well)
• in case you don't have an account yet, click on Register; otherwise, use your email address and password for signing in
• in case you've just registered, you may need to confirm your email address by clicking on a link provided in the mail
• After having logged in, you'll be presented with various tiles (including ones providing links to tutorials and quick start guides) - the particular tile of interest is the Service Catalog tile. Click on the Manage instances link
• Start creating your new LinuxONE instance by clicking the Create button
• Provide an instance name, choose SLES15SP4 as the desired OS image, and create a new SSH key pair. You can download your newly generated key pair as a single .pem file (containing both the public and the private key; that file needs to be specified using -i when logging in to your LinuxONE instance via the ssh cmd line client.)
• After having provided all required details, click the Create button and the end of the web page to actually start creating your new LinuxONE instance (this will take a while; the web page will be refreshed accordingly.)
• When your instance shows up in state Active, copy the newly assigned IP address (you'll need it for logging in via sssh)
• congratulations, you now have access to the IBM Community Cloud

NOTE: After having upgradeded your LinuxONE instance from SLES15SP4 to Tumbleweed (as outlined in ZSystems/Upgrade_SLES_to_openSUSE) the current state of your instance (as displayed in the web UI) could be reported wrongly, i.e. your system may no longer appear as Active. As long as you still have ssh access to your instance, that's not a real problem. There may, however, be some rare situations (e.g. a failed/incomplete system update) in which your instance is no longer reachable via ssh. In such a particular case, we're dependent on the support of the LinuxONE community cloud maintainers (as we unfortunately don't have a serial console access to our instances via the Marist web UI.)