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Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, this is the way to go. For when I have to use the AWS console, I use separate Chrome profiles for each of my environments, so I don't even have cookies, saved passwords, etc. that might relate to other accounts. (I also use separate Chrome themes in each environment and use a CSS manipulator such that my prod console is in a bright-freaking-red Chrome window with a red background. Blue for test, green for dev.)

For my own AWS accounts, I use a read-only account in the profile and, on the very rare occasion I want to get clicky rather than use awscli to frob something, I'll log out and log back in as my writable-to-IAM user. I have a third user that only has IAM read/write privileges if I have to deal with that service. (I haven't sold my clients on this approach, though.)

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> use a CSS manipulator such that my prod console is in a bright-freaking-red Chrome window with a red background. Blue for test, green for dev

Ha, I do the same thing. I learned about this from a previous job I had where prod/test webapps were functionally similar but had obnoxious coloring in the header. Very effective.

Visual indications are so great, aren't they? I do it with terminals, too; prod servers get obnoxious red-background prompts. (Root terms on all my machines look different from unprivileged ones, too.)

Hmm good idea. I haven't had any issue with it but it's trivial to change background colors. Probably not a bad idea. Thanks for the tip!

Wow, I can't remember the last time I ran a shell directly on a prod machine. The very thought feels so dirty now.

Whether it's shell literally, or "shell" as in, the window from which you ultimately perform shell-like things, there's still a place you perform these tasks and knowing when you are in simulation or actual is an important state to track.

When you inherit your environment and are whipping it into shape, shit happens.

How do you know what's really going on on those machines and in their respective environments assuming they are geographically distinct?

Any advice/tutorials on how to set this up? Ideally I'd like just that ssh session to change the text to red for prod boxes but then go back to my normal iTerm theme after exit...

You can muck around with your bashrc, if you use that shell.

In the .bashrc/.zshrc of the remote machine add this:

    echo '\033]11;#440000\007'

On the local machine add this to reset the terminal color:

    ssh () {/usr/bin/ssh "$@"; echo '\033]11;#000000\007'}

Any links to how to do this? My google-fu seems to be failing me. I'm assuming you somehow set things up so it automatically detects the page / content (based on the environment name or instance tags??) and changes the background?

Easy way to do this in e.g. Rails:

  <body style="foo bar baz env-#{Rails.environment}">

Then use CSS like you would normally on body.env-production, body.env-development, etc.

You meant class, not style. But great tip though:

      <body class="foo bar baz env-#{Rails.environment}">

One way to do this is to look at the "awsc-login-display-name-account" div, which contains your account ID. You can then alter the look of the page (perhaps making the top header bright red) depending on which account ID is in use.

Could make a nice Chrome extension...

You can use an extension like Greasemonkey, with a simple script which will extract aws account id and will apply some css based on it.

I log into different Chrome profiles that style the same pages differently. Dumb and easy.

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