diceline-chartmagnifiermouse-upquestion-marktwitter-whiteTwitter_Logo_Blue

Today I Learned

Automate the creation and deletion of EC2 snapshots via AWS CLI 2

We're heavily using AWS and we're scripting everything we can. As AWS CLI 2 came out recently we needed to update our scripts.

This script creates a new snapshot and deletes all snapshots older than 2 weeks, for a specific volume.

create-snapshot-and-cleanup.sh

#!/bin/bash

DESCRIPTION="example.com"
VOLUME="vol-xxxxxxxxxx"

SNAPSHOT_AGE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d --date '2 weeks ago')
TODAY=$(date +%d-%m-%Y)

echo "Creating new snapshot of volume $VOLUME."
aws ec2 create-snapshot --output text --description "$DESCRIPTION - AutoSnapshot $TODAY" --volume-id $VOLUME >> /dev/null

echo "Deleting snapshots older than: $SNAPSHOT_AGE"

snapshots=$(aws ec2 describe-snapshots --output text --filters Name=volume-id,Values=$VOLUME --query "Snapshots[?StartTime<'$SNAPSHOT_AGE'].SnapshotId")

echo "Snapshots sheduled for deletion: $snapshots"

for snapshot in $snapshots; do
  echo "Deleting $snapshot ..."
  aws ec2 delete-snapshot --snapshot-id $snapshot
done

Automatically add and remove SSH keys from remote hosts

Managing multiple hosts is a pain when using SSH key authentication. There are a lot of solutions out there for managing SSH keys, there's Ansible, Puppet, or other paid solutions.

There's also another option, to use a script to do the job for you.

Here's how

1. Create a targets file containing your hosts and usernames

# Host
hostname.example.com username

2. Create a add-keys.sh file

#!/bin/bash
keys=${1:-*.pub}
echo update ssh-keys: ${keys}

cat targets | grep -vE '^(\s*$|#)' | sed 's/#.*$//g' | while read host user
do
   echo "# Adding public ssh-keys for $user@$host"
   for k in ${keys};
   do
      echo "# Adding public key $k"
      touch ${k%\.pub}
      ssh-copy-id -f -i $k $user@$host
   done
done

3. Create a remove-keys.sh file


#!/bin/bash

keys=${1:-*.pub}
echo update ssh-keys: ${keys}

cat targets | grep -vE '^(\s*$|#)' | sed 's/#.*$//g' | while read host user
do
   echo "# Remove public ssh-keys for $user@$host"
   for k in ${keys};
   do
      echo "# Remove public key $k"
      key=$(<$k)
      ssh $user@$host 'bash -s' <<EOT
sed -i "/$key/d" ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
EOT
      echo "# Key removed"
   done
done

4. Add the public keys you want to add as .pub files in the same folder

5. Run one of the scripts. Done.

Upgrade your SSH Keys to the new Ed25519 standard

Why should you upgrade?

Your ssh key is most probably half a decade or more old, as with all technlologies, cryptographic algorithms evolve and all of them become less secure with time as vulnerabilites are discovered, or computing power increases. Good SysOps and DevOps often rotate their keys and you should too!

See all the benefits of Ed25519 here: https://ed25519.cr.yp.to

You need to upgrade right now if:

  • your key was generated using DSA you need to upgrade right now
  • your key was generated using RSA less than 3072bit length
  • your key was generated using ECDSA

Ed25519 is the public-key algorithm you should use today.

How to generate your key:

I like to have custom names for my keys, and I also add relevant information to key comments like: role, name and e-mail. The -o 100 option, increases the brute force resistance of your key by increasing the KDF rounds.

ssh-keygen -o -a 100 -t ed25519 -f ~/.ssh/zeno.popovici.ed25519 -C "Graffino Member :: Zeno Popovici (zeno@graffino.com)"

Don't forget to provide a strong password for your key.

Deploy (macOS)

You can now deploy your key. First, you need to add it to your keychain like this:

ssh-add -K ~/.ssh/zeno.popovici.ed25519

On macOS, to copy your public key to the clipboard and paste it into GitHub or other services you're using, just issue:

pbcopy < ~/.ssh/zeno.popovici.ed25519.pub

That's it!

Work with "unsafe" HTTPS on localhost in Chrome

If you work with HTTPS connections on your localhost development environment, you will often get an un-secure notification from Chrome, and this will be getting annoying.

To disable those notifications in Chrome type this in your address bar:

chrome://flags/

search for:

Allow invalid certificates for resources loaded from localhost.

and click on "Enable". Done!

As a precaution: You should use separate browsers for personal use and another for development. I do development in Chromium and my regular browsing in Safari.