Recent content on Joshua Boniface, sysadmin
I selfhost this blog, do a lot of coding, and generally do “computer stuff” on a number of different systems. Here’s what I use, current as of 2026-08-01. Client Devices Primary Laptop: Lenovo Thinkpad T14 G4 (AMD) _,met$$$$$gg. dragonstorm ,g$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$P. ------------------ ,g$$P'' '''Y$$.'. Host: 21K30044GE (ThinkPad T14 Gen 4) ,$$P' `$$$. CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U (16) @…
For those who might not know yet, on Sunday, July 19th, I decided to resign as leader of the Jellyfin project and hand over this duty to a new leader. The process outlined in the project’s constitution is now proceeding, and a new leader will be chosen soon; I have no input on the matter, by design. I wanted to write this post to outline a few of my thoughts, especially in the face of a lot…
I ❤️ Debian I’ve been using Debian, or a Debian-derived distribution, for my entire Linux journey, starting with Ubuntu 7.10 way back in 2007. I graduated to using Debian proper in 2014 or so, and also spent almost 12 years administering Debian server systems on a daily basis. I love Debian. But one of the oldest and most depended-on distributions is often one of the most misunderstood.…
Keep Iterating Well over a year ago I created the SuperSensor all-in-one presence and voice control sensor, marking the final evolution of my quest for a Home Assistant voice control satellite and environment/presence sensor. However, I had a lot of issues with that original revision over it’s first year of operation, so this year I decided to iterate on it. Introducing SuperSensor 2.0, new…
The Motivations I have a few fan arrays/walls throughout my house, namely two in my garage, and one I plan to build in my room over my bed to replace a tower fan. But PC fans can be noisy, and control is ideal. So I decided to build myself a relatively simple ESPHome-based fan controller! The Design I of course wanted to base the design off the ESP32, which is my go-to microcontroller for all…
Joshua M. Boniface joshua@boniface.me | 289-208-2830 | 1483 Epping Court, Burlington, ON L7M1P7 https://www.boniface.me | https://github.com/joshuaboniface | https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuamboniface Profile I am a driven, service-oriented individual with a strong knowledge of Linux administration, computer networking, and infrastructure management within a DevOps framework. I enjoy working with…
In 2021, I made a post about Ceph storage tuning with my my Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) project PVC, and in 2022 and in 2023 I wrote two follow-ups. The original post covered some ideas about tuning, the second clarified the methodologies and tests to provide more accurate data, and the third covered the differences between SATA and NVMe SSDs and more modern systems. At the end of that…
Not only am I a tech geek, but I’m also a multi-instrumentalist musician and composer! On this page you can find some of my work. Thraximundar Track #5 from Into Æther. I recorded this (semi-)professionally back in late 2012, with myself on vocals, guitar, and bass, with the other tracks synthesized. Into Æther My debut album, in the works since 2011 (or 2006, depending on how you count it).…
The Motivations I’ve been interested in voice-based home automation for many years now; in fact, it was one of the first posts on this blog. For many years I now I’ve used it to control the lights in my bedroom, for two major reasons: first, the lights I was using were not hardwired, and I had many of them, and thus many little switches on cords; second, I wanted to be able to switch…
In 2021, I made a post about Ceph storage tuning with my my Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) project PVC, and in 2022 I wrote a follow-up clarifying the test methodology with an upgraded hardware specification. At the end of that second part, I said: The next post in this series will look at the same performance evaluation but with NVMe SSDs, and with several even-higher OSD allocations on some…
The Backstory I’ve been a drummer for over 2 decades, since I was 14. As part of my youthful musical exploration journey, I got a very old basic drumkit from my grandfather, who was a big band drummer during his heyday, and I spent some time learning swing beats and trying to emulate some of the drummers I had come to idolize (mostly, Neil Peart). In Grade 10 I auditioned for our high school…
Today’s post is a fairly short one. I’ve used Thinkpads for quite a while, first a T450s, then a T495s. I’m a huge fan of them, even the current generations. One thing I especially like is the button layout: because of the trackpoint (a.k.a. the “nub” mouse pointer), I get an extra set of physical buttons above my trackpad, including a middle mouse button. I find…
Welcome Welcome to part three of my “Problems in FLOSS Projects” series. Better late than never. In this entry, we talk about a paradoxical problem that I’ve observed within Jellyfin and several other large projects. I hope you enjoy. The Paradox There is a seeming paradox in FLOSS projects when it comes to developer engagement versus user count. It can be summed up pretty…
One of the most oft-repeated reasons I’ve heard for software not packaging for Debian and its derivatives it that Debian packaging is complicated. Now, the thing is, it can be. If you look at the manual or a reasonably complicated program from the Debian repositories, it sure seems like it is. But I’m here today to show you that it can be easy with the right guide! My target audience…
Last year, I made a post about Ceph storage tuning with my my Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) project PVC, with some interesting results. At the time, I outlined how two of the nodes were a newer, more robust server configuration, but I was still stuck with one old node which was potentially throwing off my performance results and analysis. Now, I have finally acquired a 3rd server matching…
In early 2018, I started work on my Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) project PVC. Very quickly, I decided to use Ceph as the storage backend, for a number of reasons, including its built-in host-level redundancy, self-managing and self-healing functionality, and general good performance. With PVC now being used in numerous production clusters, I decided to tackle optimization. This turned out…
Welcome Welcome to part two of my “Problems in FLOSS Projects” series. In this entry, we talk about “Support Vampires” a.k.a. “Help Vampires”, how to spot them, what to do about them, and how to avoid being one. I hope you enjoy. Support Vampires In FLOSS communities, there is a kind of user dreaded by everyone who’s spent significant time in chat rooms or…
Welcome Welcome to part one of a series I’ve decided to create on this blog, called “Problems in FLOSS Projects”. I intend this series to be a number of relatively short posts, each one investigating an interesting topic or issue I’ve seen or faced, mostly within the Jellyfin project, but also in FLOSS self-hosted software in general. Some are technical, some are…
I love gardening - over the last couple years it’s become a great summer pasttime for me. And after a backyard revamp, I’m planning a massive flower garden to create my own little oasis. One of the parts of gardening that I’m not the biggest fan of is watering. Don’t get me wrong - it’s relaxing. But in small doses. And a big garden demands a lot of watering on a set…
Patroni is a wonderful piece of technology. In short, it allows an administrator to configure a self-healing and self-managing replicated PostgreSQL cluster, and quite simply at that. With Patroni, gone are the days of having to manage your PostgreSQL replication manually, worrying about failover and failback during an outage or maintenance. Having a tool like this was paramount to supporting…
Building a self-hosted voice interface for HomeAssistant Voice control is both a new, and quite old, piece of the home automation puzzle. As far back as the 1960’s, science fiction depicted seamless voice control of computers, culminating in, to me, one of Star Trek’s most endearing lines: “Computer, lights”, followed by the satisfying brightness of hands-free lighting! In…
DISCLAIMER: I never did proceed with this project beyond building the packages. I can offer no helpful support regarding getting it running. LibreOffice Online is a very cool project by the fine people at Collabora to bring the LibreOffice core functionality into a web browser. In effect, it’s a Free Software version of the Google Docs suite of productivity tools, allowing one or many people…
NOTICE: This project is long-since obsoleted. I never did complete it, and ended up just buying some IPMI-capable motherboards. I would receommend the various Pi-KVM solutions now available as much better, more robust replacements to this project. IPMI BMCs are pretty ubiquitous in the datacenter and enterprise computing, because in a warehouse full of computers, finding and walking up to one just…
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Welcome to my new blog, build in Hugo! Hopefully this one will stay online a little longer than my previous Wordpress-based sites! On this page you will find posts about cool stuff I’m working on, things that interest me, and general tech news and my opinions thereof. I hope you enjoy your stay!