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 14 February 2026
Linux

RHEL on ZFS Root: An Unholy Experiment

Running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on ZFS root is not supported. I did it anyway. Here’s how this cursed configuration came to be, why you shouldn’t replicate it, and what the proper alternative looks like.

Fri 13 February 2026
Linux

SELinux: A Practical Guide for Fedora and RHEL

Moving beyond “setenforce 0” - a practical guide to understanding, troubleshooting, and working with SELinux on Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Thu 12 February 2026
Linux

Podman 5.8: Quadlet Multi-File Install, Automatic SQLite Migration, and the Road to 6.0

Podman 5.8 lands with multi-file Quadlet installs, automatic BoltDB-to-SQLite migration in preparation for Podman 6.0, and several quality-of-life improvements for container workflows.

Tue 10 February 2026
Meta

Adding Fediverse Comments to a Pelican Blog

How I added a Mastodon-based comment system to this Pelican blog - no databases, no third-party services, just the Fediverse’s public API and a bit of JavaScript.

Sun 08 February 2026
Networking

Running Your Own AS: BGP on FreeBSD with FRR, GRE Tunnels, and Policy Routing

How I obtained my own AS number and IPv6 prefix, set up a FreeBSD BGP router with FRR, and built a tunnel overlay to bring globally routable addresses to servers that already have provider-assigned IPv6 - using dual-FIB policy routing to make both coexist.

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