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Notes and Hacks From Jonathan Mergy

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3 weeks ago

Dark Fiber Setup Back at Lick-Wilmerding with Monkeybrains

By Jonathan Mergy
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01January

Here are pics from way back when Alex and Rudy at Monkeybrains figured-out how to snag access to the old Earthlink dark fiber nearby for Lick-Wilmerding and to open a line of sight access point for Excelsior and Ingleside in SF. I was the Director of IT at Lick-Wilmerding at the time. We were struggling with bandwidth and were excited to partner with Alex and Rudy in addition to making something...

3 weeks ago

Seen Around San Francisco

By Jonathan Mergy
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Salvaging some old pictures from the pile of old Mergy.org files to continue sharing from years gone by around San Francisco. Most of these were taken from around 2008-2014-ish. Mount Davidson old petrified treeSt. Francis fountain car accidentOcean Beach car surferScary driveway parking sign in MissionWaldo in Glen ParkThe Pope Room at old Buca Di BeppoErlich Bachman in Masonic trafficDarth...

3 weeks ago

Fred Mergy Page Fixed, Updated

By Jonathan Mergy
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Many years ago, I created a page on my old site so if people were searching for my late father, they would find him. Over the many years, I’ve always received queries and comments from people that played and worked with my father in the Bay Area jazz scene in the 1960s through to the 1980s. The page was broken but as WordPress tech improved and I could drop all the various audio and image...

3 weeks ago

New Year, New Mergy Dot Org!

By Jonathan Mergy
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After maintaining ~15+ years of hacked together and patched versions/updates of Linux, Apache, mysql, php and WordPress, I purged a lot of junk and the maze of crazy configs over the holiday break. As we all move into 2021 and out of the mess that was 2020, I felt a purge was needed.

On to new and better things!

3 weeks ago

Images People Hot-Linked Forever Off The Site

By Jonathan Mergy
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31December

For whatever reason, people hot-linked these images off my old website for years so posting them back if they still need them for something. Please comment or let me know if you have and what was the purpose. It’s cool. Honestly, just want to know.

3 weeks ago

Favorite Maker Faire Memories Over The Years

By Jonathan Mergy
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Here are some pics from various years hitting Maker Faire in San Mateo and the East Bay.  

Dark room mechsCombat GnomesHuge motorized flyerfrom 2012?Steam areasThought it was Ren FaireMiles O’Brien doing interviewsThe big rock swingFire sculpture mechsMore Combat GnomesHippy elementPuppet sculpturesLive from the Tesla StageMore motorized mechs

6 months ago

Using fail2ban To Mitigate Excessive Apache 403, 404, 500, and 503 Attacks

By Jonathan Mergy
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08August

I finally spent some time last weekend to address the botnets attacking my site and specifically looking for known exploits, bad WordPress plugins, and just general random stuff. I should disclaimer that messing around and systematically blocking hosts viewing your website generating 404s may or may not make sense for you. If you create a fail2ban filter, jail, and start picking off hosts that...

11 months ago

IT Systems To Functions HeatMap Tool

By Jonathan Mergy
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25February

Just a sample of the beginnings of what an organizations map could look like The initial systems to functions heatmap tool concept was really brought to me in an engagement with Rippleworks and the amazing Anisha Vaswani. I took the initial concept Anisha modeled for me and ran with it a bit for nonprofits. The concept is actually pretty simple. You isolate the departmental functions of the...

Mergy Dot Org Notes and Hacks From Jonathan Mergy