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

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.

Thu 26 February 2026
Networking

Running Your Own AS: Going Multi-Homed with iBGP and three Transits

Expanding a single BGP router into a two-PoP distributed network: adding a Vultr edge router with native BGP peering, three upstream GRE providers and iBGP to tie it together - plus the stateless PF rules that make transit routing actually work.

Sat 21 February 2026
FreeBSD

HTTP/3 on FreeBSD: Getting QUIC Working with nginx in a Bastille Jail

What looked like a simple nginx config change turned into a tour through SSL library incompatibilities, pf firewall rules for a new protocol, and a multi-worker affinity problem that only shows up under real traffic. A complete guide to getting HTTP/3 working with nginx 1.28 on FreeBSD 15.0 inside a Bastille jail.

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