Python on iMil.net

Cash monitoring

Mon, 12 Jun 2017 06:35:01 +0000

I’m kind of back in the mining arena. Like everyone else nowadays, I’m mining Ethereum with a couple of R9 290 & 290X graphic cards I bought second-hand.
So far everything works as intended, but as a proper control freak, I need to know what’s happening in real-time, what’s my firepower, how’s the mining doing etc…
Like many, I use a mining pool, ethermine to be precise, and those guys had the good taste of exposing a JSON API.
Using collectd-python capabilities, I was able to write a short python script that feeds:

Launch the AWS Console from the CLI or a mobile phone

Sat, 20 May 2017 15:48:47 +0000

At ${DAYJOB} I happen to manipulate quite a few AWS accounts for different customers, and I find it really annoying to log out from one web console, to log into a new one, with the right credentials, account ids and MFA.

Here you can read a good blog post on how to enable cross account access for third parties and use a basic script to open a web browser to switch from one account to the other.
I liked this idea so I pushed it a bit further and wrote this small piece of code which allows you not only to switch accounts, but also to simply open any AWS account from the command line.

30 python lines Dynamic DNS

Mon, 20 Feb 2017 09:00:11 +0000

Here in Spain, I chose Movistar as my Internet provider, I must say I’m pretty happy with it, symmetric 300Mbps fiber optics and good service. The only annoying aspect is that they do not provide static IP for free, something I was used to and was very convenient.

In order to reach my network from places where I can’t connect to my VPN, I wrote a very simple Dynamic DNS system using dnspython, and it turned out to be fairly easy.

Fetch monit status in JSON

Wed, 16 Mar 2016 07:04:29 +0000

I wanted to use monit as my desktop-alerting system, meaning that when a service or a machine is unreachable on my personnal network, I’d see a red dot somewhere on my desktop. Why not nagios you’d ask? because my needs are not worth the hassle.

Unfortunately, monit does not have simple and nice little desktop apps like nagstamon, so I decided to write my own.

It does not seem to be well known, but monit publishes a special URI that shows a status report in XML when the mini-HTTP status server is enabled. The JSON one is only available for the commercial product they sell, M/Monit, so I wrote this small utility to manipulate status values in a JSON format and show a status report within your shell console.

EC2 VPN connection informations (updated)

Sat, 06 Jun 2015 11:19:42 +0000

For a mysterious reason, EC2 VPN connection informations are stored in XML within the JSON data retrieved by either boto or the awscli command line tool.

Here’s a quick python snippet to convert those datas in a convenient, easily parsable dict:

Combining this piece of code with jinja2 could help you generate racoon (or whatever IPSec software you use) on the fly.

Update

here’s a complete example of an automatic generation for racoon / ipsec configuration files using the previous snippet, along with jinja2.

Latency based Alias DNS record in Route53

Thu, 04 Jun 2015 23:05:56 +0000

Yes, I know I write a lot about AWS these days, but you know, obsession is my thing.

So as I wrote earlier, I generate my CloudFormation templates using troposphere, and the one thing I had to finish today was to register a latency based Alias record on Route53 for an ELB. While Route53 GUI is fairly easy to use, I’ve been stuck on its programmatic emanation for quite a while, so here’s a troposphere definition of such a CloudFormation object:

Rock your CloudFormation with troposphere and boto

Thu, 04 Jun 2015 10:55:48 +0000

So you’re using AWS CloudFormation in order to bring up complex infrastructures; haven’t you already told yourself that instead of writing down all those JSON lines by hand, you could bring more fun to your architect life? I did, and I found a way to programmatically design a whole architecture using troposphere and boto3. Simply put, troposphere gives you bindings in order to generate CloudFormation’s JSON template, but hey, it’s python, meaning that you can create loops, use conditions and even dynamically build objects.

Github flavored markdown with python

Sun, 28 Jul 2013 23:05:45 +0000

I’m slowly migrating some parts of my personal Wiki to Github using their own markdown syntax. Before committing, I wanted to make sure the docs look like they should. Here’s a small Flask snippet I wrote in order to achieve this:

Python Markdown has an extension called fenced code blocks which supports Github’s tidle (```) syntax, thus making this small program’s output similar to what the doc will finally look like.

LDAP Flask-Login snippet

Sat, 06 Jul 2013 10:38:55 +0000

At ${DAYWORK}, I am writing a simple Flask web frontend for our new information system. I wanted to have a simple authentication method and so I found the Flask-Login extention for Flask which takes care of user validation, session remembrance , and has a callback method in order to plug the authentication on whatever backend you’d like.

I came up with that little piece of code which makes Flask-Login check a user / password couple against a LDAP server, and validates a user regarding its user ID:

SaltStack: dynamic sls (updated for 0.15.3)

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 21:26:39 +0000

I’ve been learning and diving into SaltStack for about a month now, for both work and personal interest, that thing simply rocks. In the meantime, I’ve contributed a couple of modules, like bridging and Xen support, plus a couple of grains improvements for NetBSD.

But most of all, I’ve been preparing my ${DAYJOB} infrastructure for Salt, and I must say this has been much easier than I thought, thanks to this beautifully designed piece of code. One aspect I’d like to share is the simple way I found to make a minion dynamically configured, through custom-made grains.

GateOne, more than a web-based SSH

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 12:52:37 +0000

I’ve been searching for a Web-based SSH for quite a while, and I recently read about GateOne on the dedicated Wikipedia page. Not only GateOne does what I was searching for, but it also comes up with nice features like interpreting images on-the-fly.

The remote server on which I intended to run this software is, of course, a NetBSD 6.0 domU, and as I anticipated, some work was needed in order to make GateOne work on this platform.

au-to-ma-gic

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 01:08:59 +0000

Au boulot, j’ai élu une solution de déploiement à haute teneur en convivialité qui m’a été suggérée par nico, j’ai nommé fabric.

Ce soft à l’utilisation simplissime permet en un tournemain de réaliser des opérations complexes en masse sur une architecture distante en utilisant le protocole SSH.

Si la documentation de la plupart des fonctions est clarissime, l’une d’entre elles, qui pourtant me semblait avoir un fort potentiel loutresque, n’était pas très clairement exposée: upload_template. Cette fonction, comme son nom semble l’indiquer, permet d’envoyer sur un serveur distant un fichier “template” en ayant préalablement remplacé des variables par le contenu souhaité. Après un peu de lecture du code source de fabric, la subtilité de son utilisation m’est apparue.