Larvitz Blog
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Welcome to Larvitz Blog! I’m Christian, a Senior 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!

Linux Articles

  • Sun 08 November 2026
  • Linux

A Read-Only AI Reviewer for Forgejo Pull Requests

A small Python service that reviews every pull request on my self-hosted Forgejo with an LLM, posts a summary and inline findings, and is not allowed to do anything else. The interesting part was not getting a model to comment on a diff. It was getting it to stop being confidently wrong about code it had never seen, and making sure a misbehaving or manipulated bot could not change a single line.
  • Sat 31 October 2026
  • Linux

Linux Foundationals: From Silicon to Userspace - The Boot and Init Chain

The first article in the Linux Foundationals series. It traces a Fedora system from the UEFI handoff through shim and Secure Boot, MOK enrollment with mokutil, GRUB2 and Boot Loader Specification entries, the dracut initramfs and switch_root, all the way to systemd as PID 1. Then it covers units, dependencies versus ordering, targets, and how to measure and fix a slow boot with systemd-analyze.
  • Fri 16 October 2026
  • Linux

WinBoat Broke, Windows Kept Running: dockurr/windows with Plain Podman

After a cleanup broke my WinBoat installation, I brought the same Windows 11 VM back with a single rootless podman run against the old storage directory. Here is what dockurr/windows actually is, what lives in its storage folder, why NETWORK=nat quietly became passt in rootless Podman, how I verified RDP without opening a window, and a Quadlet unit to keep it around.
  • Sat 03 October 2026
  • Linux

Self-Hosted AI: Qwen 3.8 on a Rented Blackwell at 150 Tokens per Second

An open-weight Qwen 3.8 27B model, an RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell rented by the hour, and one shell command to start it. For most of my everyday coding it is good enough, it answers at roughly 150 tokens per second, and my prompts stay on infrastructure I chose. Some honest caveats about what “self-hosted” means on someone else’s GPU are included, along with the workflow that has worked best for me: a frontier model for architecture, and a fast open-weight model for the token-heavy implementation loop.
  • Thu 17 September 2026
  • Linux

No Proxmox Backup Client for RHEL? Hold My Container Runtime

RHEL 10 on ARM64, a Proxmox Backup Server, and no convenient native client package. I borrowed the client from an old server container, mounted the host root filesystem read-only, and gave SELinux a very specific explanation. Five minutes later, I had an encrypted, incremental backup. There are caveats. Updated 2026-10-18 with a maintained client image for x86_64 and aarch64 on ghcr.io.
  • Thu 03 September 2026
  • Linux

Running Citrix Workspace on Fedora with Rootless Podman

Citrix Workspace is an application I need but do not want woven into my workstation. I put its official Debian package in a disposable rootless Podman container, then pass through just enough X11, PipeWire, GPU, and webcam plumbing to open downloaded ICA files from Fedora’s file manager.
  • Sun 16 August 2026
  • Linux

Crawlfest: Building a Terminal Roguelike in Rust

For a few months now I have been building a terminal roguelike in Rust in the spirit of ADOM and NetHack. This article is about the technical groundwork: why ratatui and legion instead of a game engine, how the four map generators work (rooms, cellular-automata caverns, hand-drawn prefabs, and a hybrid of the last two), how field of view and A* pathfinding hook into my own map type through two traits, how content lives in RON files instead of code, and how save games avoid serialising the ECS at all.
  • Wed 12 August 2026
  • Linux

Chezmoi and Git: Dotfiles Without Pretending Every Machine Is the Same

A Git repository is a good place for configuration files, but it does not know where they belong, which permissions they need, or why a work laptop and a home server should differ. Chezmoi adds that missing layer. This is how I use both tools to manage fish, Git, Neovim, GnuPG, OpenSSH and Atuin, including the recovery command for the inevitable day I edit a live file directly.
  • Mon 03 August 2026
  • Linux

Sane Development Environments for Ansible Automation Code

Ansible content deserves something better than a laptop full of loosely related pip packages. My preferred setup puts the editor on RHEL, the Red Hat-packaged Ansible toolchain in a versioned Dev Container, and Podman underneath both development and Execution Environment workflows. The result is reproducible without pretending that upstream community bits and supported downstream product content are the same thing.