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!

#pf Articles

Thu 26 February 2026
Networking

Running Your Own AS: Going Multi-Homed with iBGP and three Transits

Expanding a single BGP router into a two-PoP distributed network: adding a Vultr edge router with native BGP peering, three upstream GRE providers and iBGP to tie it together - plus the stateless PF rules that make transit routing actually work.

Sun 08 February 2026
Networking

Running Your Own AS: BGP on FreeBSD with FRR, GRE Tunnels, and Policy Routing

How I obtained my own AS number and IPv6 prefix, set up a FreeBSD BGP router with FRR, and built a tunnel overlay to bring globally routable addresses to servers that already have provider-assigned IPv6 - using dual-FIB policy routing to make both coexist.

Fri 06 February 2026
FreeBSD

PF Firewall on FreeBSD: A Practical Guide

A comprehensive guide to configuring PF on FreeBSD, covering core concepts, practical configurations for jails and dual-stack networking, and advanced techniques including brute-force protection and bastion host setups with authpf.

Tue 13 January 2026
FreeBSD

GeoIP-Aware Firewalling with PF on FreeBSD

Using MaxMind’s GeoLite2 database with FreeBSD’s PF firewall to restrict client-facing services to specific countries, reducing brute-force attempts and log noise while keeping essential services globally accessible.