Larvitz Blog
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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

Kollect: The Native KDE Link Collector I Built for Myself

Kollect is a small native Plasma 6 application I wrote to get interesting links out of browser tabs and into a durable collection. It uses Kirigami and C++ on the desktop, plain TOML files by default, optional multi-user server storage, OpenRouter-powered metadata, KWallet for secrets, and a proper Fedora RPM. The source is not public, but the design is worth documenting.

chana_masala.sh: A Recipe as a Shell Script

Some years ago a chana masala arrived in a HelloFresh box and never left the household again. It has since been refactored, hardened, and put under version control. Here is the current release: a chickpea curry for hungry IT people, documented the only way I know how - as a bash script with a proper runbook attached.

A Caching FreeBSD Mirror for DN42: nginx proxy_store, pf, and a Dual-Homed VM

Patching FreeBSD machines inside the DN42 overlay network without giving them clearnet access - a dual-homed VM that lazily caches pkg.freebsd.org, update.freebsd.org, and release tarballs from ftp.freebsd.org with nginx proxy_store, follows CDN redirects server-side, and serves everything over IPv6 into the mesh. Now also available as a public DN42 service at bsdmirror.chofstede.dn42.

Upgrading FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE to 15.1-RELEASE: The Official Paths

FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE is here, and the official upgrade instructions depend on whether your system uses distribution sets or packaged base. This guide walks through both supported paths, covers the boot-loader update, and explains the configuration merging process - all based on the official 15.1 upgrading documentation.