AWS Adds ELB Security

As of May 24, Amazon Web Services added the ability to add Elastic LoadBalancers (ELB) to security group rules. This will allow you to get more specific with services that are load balanced in your security groups, instead of having to add a rule accepting inbound traffic from everyone (0.0.0.0/0). While this is a big step, ELBs themselves do not use security groups to determine who can access whatever port they’re forwarding, so if someone knows the public IP of the ELB, they can still reach the underlying ports on the EC2 instances being load balances.

But this is a good step, we look forward to seeing more development.

Source: Amazon Web Services Blog

A word of warning about 1and1.com

After dealing with them while working on a client’s website, I can’t, ingood conscience, ever recommend 1and1.com as a domain registrar or DNS host. Creating, updating, and re-naming CNAMEs and A entries take an extremely long time, with some users complaining of times over 72 hours. This is not taking into account propagation time at all, this is just how long it takes for them to update their own DNS entries on their DNS servers.

We are going on a few hours for my client, but even that is absurd for just updating an entry. Hopefully once we get to the point where DNS propagation is happening, it’ll move quickly.

Furthermore, you’re limited to 5 sub-domains, which is an effort to rope you into one of their more expensive services. You also can’t do wildcard subdomains.

tldr: Do not use 1and1.com if you are impatient or on a tight deadline. CNAME/Host entry updates take anywhere from hours to days, minus propagation time. They also artificially limit you to 5 sub-domains, and no wildcards at all.

Fixing key sticking on Minecraft (Linux)

I finally got fed up enough with my directional keys sticking onMinecraft (Linux version) to dig up a fix. I’ll post this here just in case someone else ends up afflicted. There’s a post on the Minecraft forums that I can vouch for, having done it myself. Follow the directions and stop falling off cliffs or into lava.

Tamarin 1.1 released

Tamarin 1.1 was released to account for the fact that there are rarecases where a user’s client doesn’t identify itself at all. I had accounted for one form of this, but failed to handle another. You’ll want to update to prevent ParseException exceptions from being raised if your parser runs into this.

Tamarin is a drop-in Django app that is used to parse S3 access log buckets. This is useful for getting the logs into a medium (a DB) that can be more easily queried, filtered, sorted, and etc.

PyPi page is here: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/tamarin/

Sources are on GitHub: https://github.com/duointeractive/tamarin

Amazon IAM out of beta

I missed this yesterday, but Amazon Web Services has just now announcedthe general availability (leaving beta) of they Identity Access Management service. One of the cool things about this is that there is now a tab for IAM in the web-based management console. This means that you now have an alternative to the previous “you have to do it all through the API for now”.

More details can be found on the Amazon Web Services blog.