BadgerOps

Latest — Oct 4, 2026

Training a Small Model on My Own Home Network

I have been using LLMs for years without ever training one. So I spent a few weeks teaching a 0.6B model to answer questions about my own UniFi network, and learned that my measuring stick was broken, my control group was a lucky pair, and fine-tuning made hallucination worse instead of better.

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Treating OpenClaw Like a Junior Sysadmin

(Or, yet another blog post on playing around with openclaw, just much less hype)

Why I Wrote a New Terraform Provider for UniFi

I wanted a UniFi Terraform workflow I could trust, so I wrote a new provider built around the current OpenAPI snapshot. It is published now, active, and already past its first hundred downloads.

Building an In-App Auto-Updater for a Containerized NixOS Deployment

What started as a straightforward trigger-file mechanism has evolved through a dozen iterations into something with pre-upgrade backups, separate backend/frontend version tracking, step-by-step progress reporting, and post-upgrade health checks.

Introducing Graphēon

"Network enumeration shouldn't require a PhD in Visio. So I built something."

Decoding Kubernetes Secrets with jq

It's been a while since I've posted, and I generally post about things I've learned / have helped me in my day to day role. This is a quick blog post about easily decoding base64 encoded secrets in kubernetes, using Kubectl and jq. Before diving into decoding Kubernetes secrets, let's set

CVE's

CVE's. Gamified? Maybe. Useful? Maybe. Fast-becoming-too-complex to manage? I think so. But. This is currently one of the best ways of unified reporting & alerting of vulnerabilities to a wide audience. There's certainly room for improvement. Recently, I got an inside view on the process. My current ${DAY_JOB} is heavily

Dachau

Last weekend, we traveled to the Alpine town of Garmisch, explored the beautiful Neuschwanstein Castle, and on our return trip to Stuttgart, visited the Dachau memorial. Words cannot express what we experienced while walking through the memorial site. The utter disregard for humanity. The engineered, optimized methodology for corralling, oppressing,

Keycloak & Open Shift

Hi there! So. You're running Open Shift Container Platform 4.12+ and you're wanting to deploy that shiny new Red Hat Keycloak Operator (v22) and set up Oauth from Keycloak into Open Shift. How do you deploy Keycloak as an IDP for Open Shift? The magic words being "Configure Keycloak

smtp socket: malformed response on a FIPS 140-2 system

Ok, this is a very highly specific post - but I hope it is useful for that sysadmin who's tearing their hair out trying to figure out wtf is going on with smtp failing with a vague error message. Recently, I was configuring a Postfix SMTP relay on a FIPS140-2