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!

Linux Articles

  • Sat 11 April 2026
  • Linux

Replacing Lenovo’s WWAN Unlock Blob with a 100-Line Bash Script

My ThinkPad T14s shipped with an Intel XMM7560 LTE modem that would not register on the network until Lenovo’s proprietary FCC-unlock helper ran. I replaced it with a roughly 100-line bash script from a ModemManager merge request, and along the way learned that the “unlock” is just a small challenge-response handshake that is easy to explain in plain shell.
  • Sat 28 March 2026
  • Linux

My Multi-Stage Backup Strategy: ZFS, Proxmox, and Paranoia

Backups are the thing everyone knows they should do and nobody does well enough. Here’s my multi-stage strategy for keeping about a dozen servers safe: ZFS snapshots with sanoid, off-site replication with syncoid to rsync.net, Proxmox Backup Server with an S3 backend for VMs, and a creative Podman trick for backing up RHEL hosts that don’t have proxmox-backup-client. Plus a dead man’s switch, because the only thing worse than no backups is backups that silently stopped working three months ago.
  • Sun 15 March 2026
  • Linux

Why I Prefer CentOS Stream Over Old CentOS

Old CentOS rebuilt RHEL faithfully, but its downstream position meant it could only follow, never contribute back. CentOS Stream changes that. Sitting upstream of RHEL and downstream of Fedora, it combines enterprise-grade stability with a genuine feedback loop into RHEL development. After years of running it in production, I’m convinced it’s the better model.