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

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.

Fri 06 February 2026
FreeBSD

PF Firewall on FreeBSD: A Practical Guide

A comprehensive guide to configuring PF on FreeBSD, covering core concepts, practical configurations for jails and dual-stack networking, and advanced techniques including brute-force protection and bastion host setups with authpf.

Mon 26 January 2026
Linux

Immutable Linux Desktops: Universal Blue, OSTree, and the Future of Desktop Linux

Exploring atomic desktop Linux distributions, the technology stack behind them, and why Universal Blue’s Aurora and Bazzite represent a compelling vision for reliable, maintainable desktop systems.

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