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

Distrobox: Different Distributions in a Box, Powered by Podman

A “real” RHEL container on a Fedora laptop, an Arch box for the AUR, an Ubuntu box for that one vendor tool that ships .deb files only, all of them with your home directory mounted, your shell history shared, and GUI apps that integrate into your desktop as if they were native. Distrobox uses Podman to make that boring instead of clever, and it pairs especially well with Atomic distributions where the host is meant to stay immutable.

Reproducible Ansible with Execution Environments

A “control node” with a hand-curated venv works. Until it doesn’t. A colleague has different collection versions, CI installs a slightly newer Python library, and a playbook that ran yesterday now fails. Execution Environments turn the control node into a versioned container image. ansible-builder produces it, ansible-navigator runs against it, and the same artifact ships from your laptop into AAP/AWX without modification.