Gotchas with static sites on S3 via CloudFront

There’s a ton of posts already on how to set up static sites hosted on S3 via CloudFront. This isn’t going to be one of them. What I want to discuss is some weirdness that I encountered with setting up this blog. For the purpose of this post we’re going to assume that you are going to create a hypothetical static site: https://example.com If you host a static site on hardware, or a VPS (be it an EC2 instance or a DigitalOcean Droplet) you’ll most likely do this with one of the various available web servers, like nginx or apache, and use a service like Let’s Encrypt to create the TLS certificate....

S3 backup script in a single binary

Everyone has a backup script that takes a tarball/zipfile/etc and uploads it somewhere for safe-keeping. In a lot of places where I’ve worked, the “somewhere” winds up being an Amazon S3 bucket (or lately a DigitalOcean Space). These scripts are lovingly crafted and sometimes quite clever, using the aws cli or s3cmd, or something custom. What I wanted was to encode my process for encrypting a backup and sending that backup to an S3 bucket....

Building Clouds

I’ve spent this year building networks using Amazon Web Services and teaching people how to do it. So I’d like to share the code that I’ve used as teaching examples and as seeds for the creation of some pretty cool environments. AWS PY was my first published attempt at interacting with AWS in python & Puppet to instantiate, provision and control EC2 instances, as well as the seed for an incredibly cool project at the start of this year....

S3DropBox is now on GitHub

I've released a new version of my S3DropBox on GitHub. I've moved the project to GitHub so that I can have all my current active projects in one place. Check it out in its new home at https://github.com/tomcz/s3dropbox. This release uses the AWS java libraries. They are finally good enough for me to stop creating my own wheels and vulcanising my own rubber. As a bonus the S3DropBox creates URLs in virtual hosted format (eg....

Update to S3DropBox

Another update to my S3DropBox. Due to popular demand (ahem) I've added a progress bar to track uploads and downloads. You now have something pretty to watch rather than a screenful of dots. Any other requests?...

Update to S3DropBox

I've released a new version of my S3DropBox. You can now right-click on any file to download it, delete it or create a public link to it. Comments, feedback and bugs are always welcome....

S3DropBox 1.2 is now released

I love feedback ... including bugs (thanks Cam). The S3DropBox will now only permit the creation of a bucket when Amazon S3 returns a HTTP 404 status code in response to a HTTP HEAD request for the bucket prior to creation. The new version can now be downloaded from http://code.google.com/p/s3dropbox/....

S3DropBox 1.1 has been released

This release now permits the S3DropBox to be used in corporate environments (ie. behind authenticated proxies), including being able to handle NTLM authentication with proxies. HTTPS support has been enabled, although HTTP is still used by default. Check out the new release here....

S3DropBox is now on Google Code

In June of 2008 I released the initial version of the S3DropBox as a download available from this blog (see S3DropBox). Since then I've been adding little enhancements to the drop box as updates to the linked zip files. This of course is not the right way to share an application or its code-base, so I've created a google code project at http://code.google.com/p/s3dropbox/. Feedback, patches and wish-list items are always welcome....

S3DropBox - Basic GUI to Amazon S3

For a number of years I've been answering the same question from my wife: "What is the biggest file size that I can attach to an email?" Now the answer to this is straight out of the consultant handbook: "It depends." It depends on your smtp server's limits, the reciever's limits/security policy/attachment filtering/etc. Even Google Docs has limits for file sizes. There are a number of sites that already provide a service whereby someone can upload a file and get a link to paste into an email, so that the recipient can then download the file later....