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 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.

Thu 26 March 2026
Unix

Shell Tricks That Actually Make Life Easier (And Save Your Sanity)

Watch someone backspace 40 characters instead of pressing CTRL+W, and you’ll understand why this list exists. A collection of shell tricks-grouped by what works everywhere and what’s Bash/Zsh-specific-that save keystrokes and time.

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.

Sat 14 March 2026
Linux

Linux Firewalls: How to Actually Secure a Cloud Server (iptables, nftables, firewalld, ufw)

A practical guide to the four major Linux firewall technologies - iptables, nftables, firewalld, and ufw. Covers real-world cloud server hardening with concrete examples, from locking down SSH to building zone-based configurations. Includes an honest comparison and an entirely unbiased opinion about which firewall is actually best.

Sat 14 February 2026
Linux

RHEL on ZFS Root: An Unholy Experiment

Running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on ZFS root is not supported. I did it anyway. Here’s how this cursed configuration came to be, why you shouldn’t replicate it, and what the proper alternative looks like.

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