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!

#pkgbase Articles

Three Test Jails on a 512 MB Free-Tier VPS

A bug report against my jailexec connection plugin needed a real FreeBSD jail to reproduce. An idle free-tier VPS with 512 MB of RAM turned out to be plenty: pkgbase provides a 33 MB base userland, persistent jails need no idle processes, and three Python-equipped test targets added only 1.1 GB of disk use. This is the build, including the two sharp edges that cost me twenty minutes.

Upgrading FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE to 15.1-RELEASE: The Official Paths

FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE is here, and the official upgrade instructions depend on whether your system uses distribution sets or packaged base. This guide walks through both supported paths, covers the boot-loader update, and explains the configuration merging process - all based on the official 15.1 upgrading documentation.