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 21 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.

Sat 14 March 2026
Linux

Linux Firewalls: How to Actually Secure a Cloud Server (iptables, nftables, firewalld, ufw)

A practical guide to the four major Linux firewall technologies - iptables, nftables, firewalld, and ufw. Covers real-world cloud server hardening with concrete examples, from locking down SSH to building zone-based configurations. Includes an honest comparison and an entirely unbiased opinion about which firewall is actually best.

Fri 13 March 2026
FreeBSD

FreeBSD Foundationals: ZFS - The Last Filesystem You’ll Ever Need

The second in the FreeBSD Foundationals series. This one covers ZFS from philosophy to practice: why it exists, how pools and datasets work, what checksumming and self-healing actually do, how to tune recordsize, compression, and atime, how encryption works with key management, how snapshots and the hidden .zfs directory give you time travel, and how ZFS send/recv turns backup and migration into a solved problem. Includes a look at sanoid/syncoid for automated snapshot management.

Mon 02 March 2026
FreeBSD

FreeBSD Foundationals: Jails - From Chroot on Steroids to Full Virtual Networks

The first in a series on FreeBSD fundamentals. This one covers Jails from the ground up: why they exist, how classic Jails differ from VNET Jails, what epair interfaces actually are, how bridges tie it all together, and what devfs rules do for your isolation story. Practical configurations included.

Fri 27 February 2026
Linux

Neovim Crash Course for Sysadmins: The 20% That Solve 80% of the Pain

Not another hjkl tutorial. This is the stuff you still get wrong after years of using Vim - efficient navigation, copy/paste that actually works, YAML-specific workflows, and the motions that turn config file editing from a chore into a joy.

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