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

Monitoring a FreeBSD Mastodon Instance with Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki

How I watch burningboard.net, my multi-jail FreeBSD Mastodon instance, from a separate observer host. A pull-based Prometheus stack reaching exporters across my own AS201379 backbone (locked down at the perimeter firewall, not by binding to unroutable addresses), Loki and Promtail for nginx logs, a textfile collector that fills the gaps FreeBSD exporters leave (ZFS, S3, pkg audit, Mastodon API stats), one Grafana dashboard that tells me at a glance whether the instance is healthy, and an Alertmanager ruleset that emails me before users notice.

Leaving the Apple Ecosystem: One Fairphone Instead of Two iPhones

For years I carried two iPhones, a personal iPhone 12 and a work iPhone SE, and neither ever felt at home in my Linux and BSD centric life. I finally collapsed both into a single Fairphone Gen6 running Android with separate personal and work profiles. Here is why I picked the Fairphone, how Android slots into a desktop Linux workflow far better than iOS ever did, which apps I kept, which I swapped, why finally being able to read GPG encrypted mail on my phone is a real upgrade, and where the device falls short.

IPv6 Foundations: The Internet Protocol You Should Already Be Using

A laid-back tour through the basics of IPv6: how the addresses are built, how to shorten them without losing your mind, how they map onto the IPv4 you already know, and how hosts configure themselves with SLAAC. Plus a short sidebar on NDP and why blocking ICMP on an IPv6 network is a self-inflicted wound. The premise throughout: IPv6 is the current internet protocol, IPv4 is a relic we are still dragging around, and dual-stack is a burden, not a destination. Updated 2026-06-12 with reader Q&A on privacy addresses, banning abusive clients, NAT64/DNS64, and port forwarding.
  • 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.