Badger Labs

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) teams frequently encounter challenges when sharing Terraform modules across multiple projects and repositories. Organizations often resort to copying and pasting module code between repositories, creating maintenance overhead and version drift issues. This article examines strategies for establishing a centralized module management system similar to package management approaches used in application development. The Module Sharing Challenge In distributed repository architectures, teams commonly define reusable infrastructure components such as Route53 configurations, Web Application Firewalls (WAF), and Virtual Private Clouds (VPC) as Terraform modules. Without a formal sharing mechanism, these modules are often duplicated across repositories through manual copying, leading to several issues: ...

When natural disasters strike, communication infrastructure often becomes the first casualty. Cell towers topple, fiber optic cables break, and emergency responders find themselves operating in communication blackouts. Enter the tethered drone—a promising solution that can hover at 400 feet, acting as a temporary telecommunications tower to restore critical connectivity. But here’s the engineering challenge: these systems require substantial continuous power to maintain flight operations while running telecommunications equipment. The question becomes: what’s the most efficient way to deliver that power through a 400-foot tether cable? ...

TL;DR I’m planning to build a drone-mounted Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) system using a LimeSDR Mini 2.0 and Raspberry Pi 5 that can generate high-resolution 3D maps at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods. This system will operate in any weather (assuming the drone does as well), penetrate vegetation, and provide sub-meter elevation accuracy for under $10,000 total hardware cost. The key innovation is using “snapshot SAR” processing to work around the navigation limitations of low-cost platforms. ...

Combining Multiple NVMe USB Drives with MergerFS Recently, I wanted to combine several NVMe drives using NVMe-to-USB adapters into a single large storage pool on my Linux system. My goal was to use mergerfs to create a unified mount point, making it easy to manage files across all drives. In particular i followed the instructions outlined on Perfect Media Server The Challenge: Identical USB Adapters After connecting the drives, I ran into an issue: Linux couldn’t easily distinguish between them. They weren’t each showing up in /dev/disk/by-id/, only one was. Since all the NVMe-to-USB adapters were from the same manufacturer, this causes udev (the system that creates entries in /dev/disk/by-id) to ignore or overwrite it, because: ...