markofu

Security Tools for AWS

I often get asked which tools are good to use for securing your AWS infrastructure so I figured I'd write a short listof some useful Security Tools for the AWS Cloud Infrastructure.

This list is not intended be something completely exhaustive, more so provide a good launching pad for someone as they dig into AWS and want to make it secure from the start.

Open Source

This section focuses on tools and services provided by the community and released as open-source.

imbriaco

module "my_instance" {
  source = "../path/to/crazy_module.tf"
  ...
  count = 1
  include_eip = "true"
}

miketheman

# Read more about variables and how to override them here:
# https://www.terraform.io/docs/configuration/variables.html
variable "aws_region" {
  type    = "string"
  default = "us-east-1"
}

variable "shared_secret" {
  type    = "string"
  default = "SOOPERSEKRET"

slyness

How to rename a chef node

1. Edit existing node name. Update name and save. Chef will copy the node and create a new client entry.

knife node edit oldnode

2. ssh to node
3. Change hostname and dns information

avdi

# You will need the pygments and xclip packages
# This example highlights some Bash source code
# '-O noclasses=true' tells pygments to embed colors inline in the source
# the '-t text/html' option tells xclip what "target" to specify for the selection
pygmentize -l bash -f html -O noclasses=true mysource.sh | xclip -selection clipboard -t text/html

bridgetkromhout

0. What is the name of the ELB which needs to be pre-warmed?
a. e.g. yourwebapp-yourcompany-123456789.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com

1. What is the approximate increase percentage in traffic, or expected requests/sec that will go through the load balancer (whichever is easier to answer)?
a. e.g. 3,500 per second

2. Do you know the average amount of data passing through the ELB per request/response pair?
a. e.g. Roughly 250KB.

3. Expected percent of traffic going through the ELB that will be using SSL termination?

indirect

#!/bin/bash

# I alias this script to `mux`:
#   $ alias mux=tmux-named
# Then I tell terminal to automatically attach new windows to my session named "main",
# by setting the preference named "Shells open with" to this command:
#   /path/to/tmux-named main
#
# When working on a particular project, I can jump a session for that project
# by running "mux project-name".

jed

How to set up stress-free SSL on an OS X development machine

One of the best ways to reduce complexity (read: stress) in web development is to minimize the differences between your development and production environments. After being frustrated by attempts to unify the approach to SSL on my local machine and in production, I searched for a workflow that would make the protocol invisible to me between all environments.

Most workflows make the following compromises:

• Use HTTPS in production but HTTP locally. This is annoying because it makes the environments inconsistent, and the protocol choices leak up into the stack. For example, your web application needs to understand the underlying protocol when using the secure flag for cookies. If you don't get this right, your HTTP development server won't be able to read the cookies it writes, or worse, your HTTPS production server could pass sensitive cookies over an insecure connection.

• Use production SSL certificates locally. This is annoying

mislav

Why do I feel insulted Re: automated bots making pull requests

An open source project is a lot of work. There are features to be built, bugs to be solved, releases to be made, documentation to be written and the inevitable support you have to provide via GitHub issues, Twitter and mailing lists.

Like anything worth doing, throughout this process there are hard problems that need to be solved. Valued contributors are ones who study the project's philosophy, understand the subject matter and are thinkers who gift their experience and time to the cause.

Therefore a person or a bot who joins in with a pull request that was a result of running a tool against the project's source code—like code linting or stripping of unnecessary whitespace—is a lowest form of contribution there is. It makes the statement: “Here, I didn't bother to see what current problems are in need of discussing/solving, so I ran a widely available script from the command-line t

racheldonovan

module Wysihtml5Helper
  def fill_in_wysihtml5(text)
    #js must be enabled
    page.execute_script("editor.setValue('#{text}')")
  end
end