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!

#jails Articles

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.

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.

Podman on FreeBSD: OCI Containers Without systemd

Podman runs on FreeBSD too - but without systemd, the workflow is different. This follow-up to my Linux Podman deep dive covers how to run both native FreeBSD and Linux OCI containers on FreeBSD, how container lifecycle management works without Quadlets, and how Podman complements Jails rather than replacing them.