Larvitz Blog
Mastodon

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

  • Sun 07 June 2026
  • DIY

A Monoblock AC Is Only as Good as Its Window Seal

I moved into a top-floor 1970s apartment in one of the warmest corners of Germany, work from home, and needed the office to stay below “thinking is hard now”. A single-hose portable AC is a thermodynamically compromised machine, but most of what makes it bad happens at the window. Here is the personal story, a short detour into why these units leak, and the cheap XPS panel I cut to fix the part that actually matters.
  • Wed 03 June 2026
  • Meta

The AI Stack I Actually Run in 2026: A Laptop iGPU and Four Rented Frontiers

The most interesting thing about AI in 2026 is not which frontier model wins this month’s benchmark. It is that the frontier became a commodity you rent through near-interchangeable clients, while the part with actual craft in it moved onto the integrated Radeon 780M in my laptop. Here is the tiered stack I actually run, with the local layer in detail because that is the unusual part, and the cloud layer kept brief because the pricing is on the vendors’ own pages and will be wrong by autumn.

bcachefs on RHEL 10.2: The Kernel That Said No

A few months ago I bullied RHEL onto a ZFS root and it worked. This time I tried to get bcachefs running on RHEL 10, lost a whole evening to compile errors, and the kernel won. Here is the autopsy, plus what bcachefs actually is and why an out-of-tree filesystem and a conservative enterprise kernel are a terrible couple.