Larvitz Blog
Mastodon

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!

#linux Articles

Hardware Keys Without GnuPG: The Rust OpenPGP Card Stack, Now in FreeBSD Ports

Three small Rust tools from the OpenPGP Card project replace the GnuPG stack for my everyday hardware key work: oct to manage OpenPGP cards and Nitrokeys, oct-git to sign Git commits, and openpgp-card-ssh-agent as a hardware-backed SSH agent. I ported all three to FreeBSD and they are now in the ports tree. This article explains what each tool does, how they share PIN handling, and how I set them up on Fedora and on my FreeBSD T480.
  • Sat 31 October 2026
  • Linux

Linux Foundationals: From Silicon to Userspace - The Boot and Init Chain

The first article in the Linux Foundationals series. It traces a Fedora system from the UEFI handoff through shim and Secure Boot, MOK enrollment with mokutil, GRUB2 and Boot Loader Specification entries, the dracut initramfs and switch_root, all the way to systemd as PID 1. Then it covers units, dependencies versus ordering, targets, and how to measure and fix a slow boot with systemd-analyze.

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.
  • Sat 03 October 2026
  • Linux

Self-Hosted AI: Qwen 3.8 on a Rented Blackwell at 150 Tokens per Second

An open-weight Qwen 3.8 27B model, an RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell rented by the hour, and one shell command to start it. For most of my everyday coding it is good enough, it answers at roughly 150 tokens per second, and my prompts stay on infrastructure I chose. Some honest caveats about what “self-hosted” means on someone else’s GPU are included, along with the workflow that has worked best for me: a frontier model for architecture, and a fast open-weight model for the token-heavy implementation loop.
  • Thu 17 September 2026
  • Linux

No Proxmox Backup Client for RHEL? Hold My Container Runtime

RHEL 10 on ARM64, a Proxmox Backup Server, and no convenient native client package. I borrowed the client from an old server container, mounted the host root filesystem read-only, and gave SELinux a very specific explanation. Five minutes later, I had an encrypted, incremental backup. There are caveats. Updated 2026-10-18 with a maintained client image for x86_64 and aarch64 on ghcr.io.
  • Thu 03 September 2026
  • Linux

Running Citrix Workspace on Fedora with Rootless Podman

Citrix Workspace is an application I need but do not want woven into my workstation. I put its official Debian package in a disposable rootless Podman container, then pass through just enough X11, PipeWire, GPU, and webcam plumbing to open downloaded ICA files from Fedora’s file manager.

bcachefs on RHEL 10.2: The Kernel That Said No

A few months ago I bullied RHEL onto a ZFS root and it worked. This time I tried to get bcachefs running on RHEL 10, lost a whole evening to compile errors, and the kernel won. Here is the autopsy, plus what bcachefs actually is and why an out-of-tree filesystem and a conservative enterprise kernel are a terrible couple.

Distrobox: Different Distributions in a Box, Powered by Podman

A “real” RHEL container on a Fedora laptop, an Arch box for the AUR, an Ubuntu box for that one vendor tool that ships .deb files only, all of them with your home directory mounted, your shell history shared, and GUI apps that integrate into your desktop as if they were native. Distrobox uses Podman to make that boring instead of clever, and it pairs especially well with Atomic distributions where the host is meant to stay immutable.
  • Sat 11 April 2026
  • Linux

Replacing Lenovo’s WWAN Unlock Blob with a 100-Line Bash Script

My ThinkPad T14s shipped with an Intel XMM7560 LTE modem that would not register on the network until Lenovo’s proprietary FCC-unlock helper ran. I replaced it with a roughly 100-line bash script from a ModemManager merge request, and along the way learned that the “unlock” is just a small challenge-response handshake that is easy to explain in plain shell.