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!

#automation Articles

ArtCraft: Desktop Apps Built with AI, Useful Results, and Open Questions

ArtCraft is attempting to rebuild familiar creative and office applications in Rust with AI coding agents. PhotoCraft worked for my thumbnails, the applications started quickly, and native FreeBSD builds exist. Those are interesting observations, but they do not establish equivalence with Photoshop or Office. A look at the project, its agent-friendly architecture, and the questions that remain about correctness, maintenance and its future.

The Ansible Guy Finally Automates His Own Patching: FreeBSD, Jails, Proxmox and RHEL

I write Ansible for a living, and I still patched most of my own servers by hand every week. This is how that ended: a Git-based inventory, defensive patch playbooks for FreeBSD (freebsd-update and pkgbase), Bastille thin jails, classic thick jails via my jailexec connection plugin, a Proxmox cluster and RHEL. Ansible Automation Platform runs it for me, but nothing here requires it. Plus the mistakes, including the reboot policy I should have checked before the first real run.

Three Test Jails on a 512 MB Free-Tier VPS

A bug report against my jailexec connection plugin needed a real FreeBSD jail to reproduce. An idle free-tier VPS with 512 MB of RAM turned out to be plenty: pkgbase provides a 33 MB base userland, persistent jails need no idle processes, and three Python-equipped test targets added only 1.1 GB of disk use. This is the build, including the two sharp edges that cost me twenty minutes.
  • 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.

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.

Automating FreeBSD Jails with cdist - Zero Dependencies Inside the Jail

cdist is refreshingly minimal - the target only needs POSIX sh, and the control machine speaks ssh. But cdist expects one ssh endpoint per host, and FreeBSD jails are not normally their own ssh targets. Two small Python wrappers plug cdist into jexec on the host, so configuration state flows into every jail without running a single daemon, agent, or Python interpreter inside the jail itself.