Welcome to Larvitz Blog! I’m Christian, a Cloud Consultant by day and FreeBSD enthusiast by night, with over 20 years in enterprise IT. Here I write about FreeBSD jails, PF firewalling, self-hosting, Linux system administration, and anything that’s cleanly engineered. Most articles are hands-on guides born from running my own infrastructure, from dual-stack networking and Ansible automation to hosting a Mastodon instance on FreeBSD.

Have a question or want to discuss something? Find me on the Fediverse at @Larvitz@burningboard.net. I’m always happy to chat!

Articles

Sat 28 March 2026
Linux

My Multi-Stage Backup Strategy: ZFS, Proxmox, and Paranoia

Backups are the thing everyone knows they should do and nobody does well enough. Here’s my multi-stage strategy for keeping about a dozen servers safe: ZFS snapshots with sanoid, off-site replication with syncoid to rsync.net, Proxmox Backup Server with an S3 backend for VMs, and a creative Podman trick for backing up RHEL hosts that don’t have proxmox-backup-client. Plus a dead man’s switch, because the only thing worse than no backups is backups that silently stopped working three months ago.

Thu 26 March 2026
Unix

Shell Tricks That Actually Make Life Easier (And Save Your Sanity)

Watch someone backspace 40 characters instead of pressing CTRL+W, and you’ll understand why this list exists. A collection of shell tricks-grouped by what works everywhere and what’s Bash/Zsh-specific-that save keystrokes and time.

Mon 23 March 2026
FreeBSD

Dual-FIB Policy Routing on FreeBSD: Two Upstreams, One Server, Zero Confusion

How to run a FreeBSD server with two completely independent internet uplinks - a physical provider and a BGP tunnel - using dual-FIB routing tables, PF’s rtable and reply-to directives, and a single bridge that carries NAT’d, routed, and pure public jail traffic simultaneously.

Sat 21 March 2026
Networking

Running Your Own AS: Joining an IXP with a Third Edge Router

Connecting AS201379 to LocIX Düsseldorf via a dedicated edge router - adding direct exchange point peering to the existing multi-homed BGP setup, completing a three-router FreeBSD infrastructure with transit, native peering, and IXP connectivity.

Sun 15 March 2026
Linux

Why I Prefer CentOS Stream Over Old CentOS

Old CentOS rebuilt RHEL faithfully, but its downstream position meant it could only follow, never contribute back. CentOS Stream changes that. Sitting upstream of RHEL and downstream of Fedora, it combines enterprise-grade stability with a genuine feedback loop into RHEL development. After years of running it in production, I’m convinced it’s the better model.

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