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!

#proxmox Articles

The Ansible Guy Finally Automates His Own Patching: FreeBSD, Jails, Proxmox and RHEL

I write Ansible for a living, and I still patched most of my own servers by hand every week. This is how that ended: a Git-based inventory, defensive patch playbooks for FreeBSD (freebsd-update and pkgbase), Bastille thin jails, classic thick jails via my jailexec connection plugin, a Proxmox cluster and RHEL. Ansible Automation Platform runs it for me, but nothing here requires it. Plus the mistakes, including the reboot policy I should have checked before the first real run.

Claude Code on a FreeBSD Desktop: Plasma, xrdp, the Linuxulator and One Very Confusing PATH

A FreeBSD 15.1 Plasma desktop in a Proxmox VM, reachable over xrdp, running Claude Code as a Linux binary through the Linuxulator. Along the way: an Xorg that found no screens, a KRDP package that does not exist, a VirtIO-GPU that gives you a framebuffer but no acceleration, and a “version regression” that turned out to be two Claude installations fighting over my PATH. Then I let the agent firewall the machine it was running on, and it did that more carefully than I usually do. It also got one thing wrong, and of course it was the thing about root.
  • 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.
  • 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.