Aaron VanSledright

Author: Aaron VanSledright

  • Where Is It Five O’Clock Pt: 1

    I bought the domain whereisitfiveoclock.net a while back and have been sitting on it for quite some time. I had an idea to make a web application that would tell you where it is five o’clock. Yes, this is a drinking website. I saw this project as a way to learn more Python skills, as…

  • EC2 Action Slack Notification

    I took a brief break from my Lambda function creation journey to go on vacation but, now i’m back! This function will notify a Slack channel of your choosing when an EC2 instance enters “Starting, Stopping, Stopped, or Shutting-Down” status. I thought this might be useful for instances that reside under a load balancer. It…

  • Check EC2 Instance Tags on Launch

    In my ever-growing quest to automate my AWS infrastructure deployments, I realized that just checking my tags wasn’t good enough. I should force myself to put tags in otherwise my instances won’t launch at all. I find this particularly useful because I utilize AWS Backup to do automated snapshots nightly of all of my instances.…

  • AWS Tag Checker

    I wrote this script this morning as I was creating a new web server. I realized that I had been forgetting to add my “Backup” tag to my instances so that they would automatically be backed up via AWS Backup. This one is pretty straight forward. Utilizing Boto3 this script will iterate over all of…

  • Lambda Function Post to Slack

    I wrote this script out of a need to practice my Python skills. The idea is that if a file gets uploaded to an S3 bucket then the function will trigger and a message with that file name will be posted to a Slack channel of your choosing. To utilize this you will need to…

  • Working From Home Tips

    I’ve been working from home for some time now and have gotten into a pretty good routine that keeps me sane, healthy and happy. Create a schedule. You need to have a routine that you stick to starting with waking up at a decent time. You don’t have to commute to an office which is…

  • Automatically Transcribing Audio Files with Amazon Web Services

    Automatically Transcribing Audio Files with Amazon Web Services

    I wrote this Lambda function to automatically transcribe audio files that are uploaded to an S3 bucket. This is written in Python3 and utilizes the Boto3 library. You will need to give your Lambda function permissions to access S3, Transcribe and CloudWatch. The script will create an AWS Transcribe job with the format: ‘filetranscription’+YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS I…

  • Slack’s New Nebula Network Overlay

    I was turned on to this new tool that the Slack team had built. As an avid Slack user, I was immediately intrigued to test this out. My use case is going to be relatively simple for the sake of this post. I am going to create a Lighthouse, or parent node, in an EC2…

  • Discovering DHCP Servers with NMAP

    I was working at a client site where a device would constantly receive a new IP address via DHCP nearly every second. It was the only device on the network that had this issue but I decided to test for rogue DHCP servers. If someone knows of a GUI tool to do this let me…

  • Monitoring Disk Space with CloudWatch

    I recently had a request to monitor disk space. Being that I don’t use a traditional monitoring platform but rather send all of my alerting to Slack I wondered how this would work. There is not a direct metric in CloudWatch so we will utilize the scripts available in this guide. You can follow along…