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!
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.
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.
