Strategic IT Consulting and Implementation Services

AuthorJonathan Mergy

Fred Mergy Page Fixed, Updated

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...

New Year, New Mergy Dot Org!

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!

Favorite Maker Faire Memories Over The Years

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

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

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...

IT Systems To Functions HeatMap Tool

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...

SSH Honeypot Cowrie Session Video

I had a ssh honeypot running a few months ago for a couple of weeks and while most session playbacks are just rapid fire scripts from bots trying to plant crypto mining software, I did have a few humans kicking around in there. I had a colleague login and kick the tires and shared the video back to him. Here is the video to give you a sense of what the ssh session looks and feels like. Disclaimer...

Fixing the fail2ban filter for Postfix unverified address / user unknown spam attacks

For whatever reason, the default distributed postfix filter I had on my fail2ban setup on ubuntu was not triggering on: 450 4.1.1 Receipient address rejected: unverified address: unknown user mail.log errors. The failregex line was in there for it, but it wasn’t hitting on the endless dictionary attack random attempts from spammer servers across the world. This was annoying because, in...

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