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!

#grafana Articles

Running Your Own AS: An IXP over VXLAN, IPv4 on the Overlay, and a Config Spring Clean

Part 5 of the AS201379 journey: joining EVIX, an internet exchange that hands out VXLAN tunnels instead of switch ports, carrying a routed IPv4 /29 across the IPv6 overlay with PF policy routing, the dual-FIB routing that makes a VPS work as both a normal host and a routed AS site, moving the downstream MikroTik onto WireGuard, and a long-overdue cleanup of four routers’ worth of accumulated configuration.

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.