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!

#vscode Articles

Mon 03 August 2026
Linux

Sane Development Environments for Ansible Automation Code

Ansible content deserves something better than a laptop full of loosely related pip packages. My preferred setup puts the editor on RHEL, the Red Hat-packaged Ansible toolchain in a versioned Dev Container, and Podman underneath both development and Execution Environment workflows. The result is reproducible without pretending that upstream community bits and supported downstream product content are the same thing.

Sun 10 May 2026
Linux

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.