Larvitz Blog
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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

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.