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ABOUT MOVING MY HOSTED WORDPRESS SITE TO STATIC HTML ON AWS

April 17, 2020 April 17, 2020

Until recently, this was a WordPress site running on a traditional web hosting
service with no SSL certificate. It’s now a collection of static files sitting
in S3 buckets in AWS fronted by Amazon’s CloudFront CDN behind an HTTPS URL,
with email handled by Amazon WorkMail. My web life has gotten much simpler, I
have a lot more money left over, and my security posture has dramatically
improved, to say nothing of the radically improved load times making both
Google’s algorithms and human visitors happy. Read more →

AWS, WWW


HOW TO ELIMINATE HISS IN WINDOWS AUDIO

October 5, 2018 October 5, 2018

After tiring of my 12-year old Creative Sound Blaster sound card paired with a
set of Logitech speakers, I decided to treat myself, so I upgraded to an
external DAC (a.k.a. external sound card) outputting to and amp powering some
high-end Bowers & Wilkins studio monitors. This upgraded solution cost five
times the price of the older consumer grade setup I was running (and was
universally touted as fantastic-sounding), so you can image my surprise when I
plugged it into my shiny new custom-built Windows 10 PC (with a dedicated USB
port specifically for external DACs), and I still heard a very noticeable hiss
in the background whenever I played any music. It reminded me of old cassette
tape hiss from the 1980s. After upgrading and rearranging all my cables without
improvement I finally found the cause and the easy fix… Read more →

Hardware, Microsoft, Miscellaneous


HOW TO GET AWS STEP FUNCTIONS TO ACT ON A LAMBDA VARIABLE’S VALUE

September 27, 2018 September 27, 2018

In my previous post I explained the basics of how to pass variable values from
one state machine Lambda function to another. But what if you want to have AWS
Step Functions take some sort of action based on the value of one of those
variables? Perhaps you want the Step Function to pause until an instance is
finished shutting down, or a snapshot has finished copying, etc. If you’re not a
moderately experienced programmer you may not be familiar with this, and since
Amazon’s documentation on these sort of “basics” is rather sparse, I thought I’d
explain it here. Read more →

AWS


BASICS OF PASSING VARIABLES BETWEEN STATE MACHINES IN AWS STEP FUNCTIONS

September 16, 2018September 27, 2018

AWS recently added Step Functions to their lineup, which I have found to be one
of the most exciting new services they’ve released in a while. It has some
amazing potential for allowing you to break up Lambda functions into a lot of
component parts and chain them together (including wait conditions and other
bells & whistles), but if you don’t already have a strong programming background
it won’t be clear to you how to actually make this work, since their
documentation isn’t as thorough as it could be, and they assume a certain basic
level of background programming knowledge. I come from an
Infrastructure/Operations background, so if you’re not a programming expert, but
you still want to utilize these tools to automate your life and just get things
done, I can sympathize. To that end, here’s a quick run-down of the basics
you’ll need to know to dip your toe into this ocean of possibilities.  Read more
→

AWS


WHY AWS ENCRYPTED SNAPSHOT STATUS IS ERROR

September 16, 2018

If you’ve ever been scratching your head after attempting to create or copy an
encrypted snapshot in AWS after being left with an unhelpful “Error” status and
no other useful troubleshooting information, here’s one thing to check.

Read more →

AWS


USE PYTHON TO ADD AWS SECURITY GROUP RULES FROM A LIST OF IPS

May 25, 2018

Have you ever had a list of IP addresses that you wanted to allow inbound
traffic from in an AWS security group, but didn’t want to manually put them in
one at a time? You’re in luck! Here’s a little Python script I wrote that will
read in a list of IPs from a CSV file, and create security group rules for each
address in the security group you specify, automatically. Read more →

AWS


SAFELY RESTORE AN AWS EC2 ROOT VOLUME FROM SNAPSHOT

April 7, 2018April 10, 2018

Sure, most people with servers in AWS occasionally take snapshots of their EC2
instances’ root volumes to protect against crashes, corrupt updates, etc., but
many new AWS admins never actually attempt to to restore a server’s backed-up
root volume from a snapshot until they have to. So, if you’ve never had to do it
before, and now a series of panicked web searches has lead you here, then don’t
worry – it’s easy to restore the server back to its snapshotted state, even
maintaining its original IP address and host name, just like nothing happened.
Here’s how…

Read more →

AWS


HOW TO USE ENCRYPTED ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES IN LAMBDA FUNCTIONS

February 13, 2018February 13, 2018

Need to write a Lambda function that will log in to something? Don’t hard-code
your username or password in the script – store them as encrypted environment
variables instead! Here’s how:

Read more →

AWS


FOUR AWS CLI COMMANDS TO SET UP A CROSS-REGION/ACCOUNT SNS TOPIC SUBSCRIPTION &
PERMISSIONS

February 11, 2018February 11, 2018

As I mentioned in my previous post, you can subscribe an AWS SNS topic in one
region/account to a Lambda function in a different region and/or account
(assuming you already have the accounts talking to each other) via the CLI. This
can’t be done with CloudFormation (I’m told cross-region subscriptions are in
the works), and you can’t do it through the console, so the CLI is your only
option if you want to make this happen. Luckily, it can be done in four easy
steps.

Read more →

AWS


INVOKING REMOTE LAMBDA FUNCTIONS WITH CUSTOM RESOURCES IN AWS CLOUDFORMATION
TEMPLATES

February 4, 2018February 11, 2018

One under-appreciated feature of Amazon Web Services’ CloudFormation templates
is the ability to make custom resources. Inspired by my previous post on how to
update Infoblox DNS records using curl, I’ll now take that idea one step further
and give a quick taste of how you could use CloudFormation custom resources to
automatically update DNS records via some Python code in an AWS Lambda function
(hint: adapt those curl commands in Python using “requests“). You may not have
this exact use case, but the principles are the same no matter what you want
CloudFormation to interact with.

Read more →

AWS


ADD OR DELETE DNS RECORDS IN INFOBLOX USING CURL

February 3, 2018February 4, 2018

Infoblox has a handy Web API that you can use to programmatically edit DNS
records if you’re using it to manage DNS at your organization. (This is
especially helpful when you do it via AWS CloudFormation templates using a
Lambda-backed custom resource, since you can have it automatically add, update,
and delete records when you create, update, and delete your stacks. (I demo that
in my next post.) Before you write a program to automate DNS entries though,
you’ll want to test it using a command line tool like “Curl” in Linux. I didn’t
find Infoblox’s WAPI documentation particularly helpful, so after some trial and
error, here are the basics that I found work well. Read on to save some of the
same headaches of figuring this all out, and just get going. Read more →

AWS, Linux, WWW



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