Aaron VanSledright

A Blog about my adventures in the cloud.

  • 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…

  • Amazon S3 Backup from FreeNAS

    Amazon S3 Backup from FreeNAS

    I was chatting with my Dad about storage for his documents. He mentioned wanting to store them on my home NAS. I chuckled and stated that I would just push them up to the cloud because it would be cheaper and more reliable. When I got home that day I thought to myself how I…

  • Setting Up AWS Chatbot

    Amazon Web Services pushed their new Chatbot into beta recently. This simple bot will allow you to get alerts and notifications sent to either Slack or Amazon Chime. Because I use Slack for alerting I thought this would be a great tool. Previously I utilized Marbot to accommodate a similar function. Marbot is a great…

  • Copying Files To & From an AWS S3 Bucket

    Copying Files To & From an AWS S3 Bucket

    Recently I needed to download an entire bucket worth of data for an offsite backup. Easy right? Go to the Amazon Web Services Console and hit download! WRONG. You can download individual files but not an entire bucket. Seems silly. Luckily there is an easy way to do it via the Amazon Web Services CLI.…

  • AWS CLI For CPU Credit Balance

    AWS CLI For CPU Credit Balance

    Here is how you create a CloudWatch alarm to monitor CPU Credit Balances less than a certain amount: aws cloudwatch put-metric-alarm –alarm-name YOUR NAME HERE–alarm-description “Alarm when CPU Credits is below 200” –metric-name CPUCreditBalance –namespace AWS/EC2 –statistic Average –period 300 –threshold 200 –comparison-operator LessThanThreshold –dimensions Name=InstanceId,Value=INSTANCEIDHERE –evaluation-periods 2 –alarm-actions ARN:YOURSNSTOPIC CloudFormation Template:https://github.com/avansledright/CloudFormation-CPU-CREDIT-BALANCE

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