Month: February 2024

'connections' => [
   ...
   'sns-sqs' => [
      'driver' => 'sns-sqs',
      'key' => env('AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID'),
      'secret' => env('AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY'),
      'region' => env('AWS_DEFAULT_REGION', 'us-east-1'),
      'prefix' => env('SQS_PREFIX', 'https://sqs.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/your-account-id'),
      'queue' => env('SQS_QUEUE', 'default'),
      'suffix' => env('SQS_SUFFIX'),
      'after_commit' => false,
      'endpoint' => env('AWS_ENDPOINT'),
      'sns_topic_arn' => env('SNS_TOPIC_ARN', 'arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:your-account-id:topic'),
  ],
]

I remember Dark Forces, or Star Wars: Doom, as a slog. Running a demo of the 1995 game on a Gateway system with an Intel 486DX at 33 MHz, I trudged through seemingly endless gray hallways. I shot at a steady trickle of Stormtroopers with one their own (intentionally) semi-accurate blaster rifles. After a while, I would ask myself a pertinent, era-specific question: Why was I playing this low-energy nostalgia trip instead of actual Doom?

Dark Forces moved first-person shooters forward in a number of ways. It could lean on Star Wars for familiar sounds and enemies and tech, and a plot with a bit more complexity than "They’re demons, they gotta go." It let the player look up and down, jump, and crouch, which were big steps for the time. And its level design went beyond "find the blue key for the blue door," with some clever environmental puzzles and challenges.

Not that key cards don’t show up. This game is from 1995, so there are key cards, there are hidden wall-doors, and there are auto-spawning enemies. It’s not like the Dark Forces designers could entirely ignore Doom. Nobody could.

Having played through some enjoyable hours of Dark Forces Remaster, I’ve come around quite a bit on this Doom-era game’s worthiness. In 2024, I can joyfully rip through research facilities, foundries, sewers, and space stations at a breakneck clip, stuffing bad guys full of laser blasts from every angle and distance. The grenades (err, thermal detonators) actually feel viable and fun to use. The levels, and the game as a whole, are higher resolution and easier to appreciate at this faster, more frenetic pace.

Nightdive Studios continues its streak of providing spiffed-up but eminently faithful remasters of classic titles with Dark Forces Remastered. The studio’s leaders told Ars last year that their goal was games that "play the way you remember them playing. Not the way they actually did on your 486 [computer], but in an evocative manner." For me, Dark Forces Remastered feels far, far better than I remember, and so I’ve gotten a chance to absorb a lot more of the world it’s trying to evoke.

An elegant shooter full of clumsy blasters

A quick primer on Dark Forces: You are mercenary Kyle Katarn, working for the Rebellion around the time of Episode IV (the first Death Star one), helping the rebels investigate and halt the development of Dark Troopers. Dark Troopers are essentially Stormtroopers with big shoulder pauldrons and the ability to deflect blaster fire. You can use all kinds of found weapons, including blasters, land mines, and rocket launchers. But you will not become a Jedi, because that happens in the next game.

Due either to thematic or technical restrictions of the time, you’re not typically fighting huge arenas of baddies. You are meant to sneak through hallways and turn corners, popping a few at a time. Unless you’re me, that is, liberated by playing at 4K at 120 frames per second (and, sometimes, cheat codes), wantonly wrecking dudes who didn’t get the memo about my arrival.

The little voice stings—"Stop!" "You’re not authorized!"—were a delight, if often cut short by the quick dispatching of their speaker. For the first few levels, I felt like the Rebellion could have destroyed five Death Stars in just two movies if they had a few more Kyles like me. But Dark Forces does ramp up as you go on.

All the same cheat codes from the original game work—Nightdive even gives you places to type them in and then activate them in menus—and I had to lean on a couple level skips and resupplies to get through the first seven levels. The objectives get far twistier and "What did flipping that switch do?" as you roll on. Some of the battery-powered devices, like infrared goggles and gas masks, are all but essential at times, and the long levels with their repeating wall textures can have you wasting them. It’s never quite unfair, but you realize how tough this must have been at a far lower frame rate and walking speed. And without such easy access to online walk-throughs, of course.

There are new lighting effects, much nicer menus and options, gamepad support (including rumble), and polished cutscenes, in addition to the gameplay that now tilts a bit more toward Motörhead than Rush in speed and feel. But, really, what sells Dark Forces Remastered is the game beneath the upgrades. If you have any interest in hopping on Jabba the Hutt’s barge again, this is the way to do it.

Listing image by Nightdive/LucasFilm

Jantz is a crucial source for many who fashion knives.

For 58 years Jantz Knife Supply has met the needs of cutlery craftsmen of all stripes, from green behind the ears to on up in years, with everything needed to make knives. This includes specialty steels, handle components, sheath materials, hand tools and sanding supplies, as well as the heavy equipment for knifemaking.

What started as a small mom-and-pop gun supply outfit founded by Ken and Venice Jantz in 1966 is no less than a U.S.-based juggernaut in today’s cutlery industry. The Jantzes haven’t left their humble beginnings behind, though, so no customer job is too small for the venerable knifemaking supply company in the heartland of America, Davis, Oklahoma.

Shanna Kemp oversees the marketing, financial and human resources for Jantz. She probably knows as well as anyone about the many specialty and other items available to the company’s legion of customers.
“Our goal is to provide everything knifemakers could need for their project,” she begins, “whether you’re a beginner looking for a new hobby or a custom knifemaker stocking your shop to get ready for the BLADE Show. One thing we really love is creating fixtures and tools to make knifemaking more accessible for every skill level.”

One of the company’s most popular new fixtures is the PDJ Knife Vise. “It’s handy for all levels of knifemakers as it allows you to drill perfectly perpendicular holes through your handle material” regardless of the material’s texture or unevenness, Shanna explains.
Jantz stocks an abundance of parts for assembling and enhancing knives of all types. “Our most popular products are our Corby rivets, Loveless bolts and metal round and bar stock,” Shanna enumerates. “Our customers love the quality of our materials as we source directly from reputable mills with consistent quality and do our cutting and machining in house. One of our other popular products is our handcrafted mosaic pins. Each pin design is meticulously hand assembled right here in Davis, Oklahoma.”

Jantz Steel Stock

An outstanding blade is the heart of any knife and Jantz offers all kinds of stainless and high carbon steels. “We carry a variety of knifemaking steels to suit both forging and stock removal,” she states. “1095 and 80CrV2 are very popular carbon steels and CPM 154 is our most popular stainless steel.” She added that the damascus forged by Brad Vice’s Alabama Damascus is very popular because of the quality and solid price point for the company’s patterned-welded steel.

“For Jantz, steel and other metals have always had a long lead time since we source from a variety of mills in the U.S., Germany, Sweden, Brazil and others,” Shanna observes. “We have strong relationships with our suppliers, and they have worked with us to keep material moving forward even when lead times began to exceed a year.”

Fixed blades will never go out of style, Shanna opines, and the Jantz business model caters to the mindset that drives the knives’ popularity. “We find that fixed-blade makers tend to use both stock removal and forging in their blade design and development,” she states. “The television series Forged in Fire certainly increased the popularity of forging, but we still see about the same divide between stock removal and forging. Fixed blades designed for hunting and survival are top sellers for our custom knifemakers as well as our hobbyists. There’s something special about using a knife in the field during hunting season that you made yourself that really resonates with the knifemaking crowd.”

When it comes to heat-treating ovens, Jantz recommends Paragon kilns above all others. “Not only do they make a quality oven,” Shanna assesses, “but they have a variety of ovens designed for beginners to pros. Their customer service is top notch and Burt Flanagan, who represents Paragon’s knifemaking ovens, is a custom knifemaker, so he truly understands what knifemakers need.”

Jantz-Made Blades

For those wanting to get their feet wet in the cutlery world, Jantz offers a cornucopia of pre-made blades for virtually any niche of the market, including household cutlery. According to Shanna, many custom makers order beautiful stainless damascus in various patterns from Damasteel for their kitchen knives. “Our Jantz-made line of household cutlery is especially popular with customers,” she adds. “Our santoku, cook’s and paring blades are favorites of makers using pre-shaped blades for project knifemaking. All the Jantz-made blades are manufactured in our facility.”

Jantz offers an abundance of both knife blades and knife kits. These are designed not only for the novice and hobbyist, but for those who want to tailor special knives for sale. The Jantz website offers links aplenty to a wide range of genres in both folders and fixed blades. Need a fixed-blade hunter in damascus? No problem. Like a kit to learn the ins-and-outs of folding knives? There are over a dozen styles available, from traditional slip joints to modern tactical fare.

If there is an innovation on the horizon, Jantz Supply will be on top of it. “One of the many things we love about the knifemaking community is how open and sharing makers are with each other,” Shanna observes. “Want to learn something [another knifemaker] is doing? Just ask. You will rarely find someone not willing to share.”

That spirit and willingness to help is what has made Jantz an important part of the cutlery industry for going on six decades now.

More On Knifemaking:

Here’s a short summary of the next 7,000-ish words for folks who hate the thing recipe sites do where the authors babble about their personal lives for pages and pages before getting to the cooking: This article is about how to install bind and dhcpd and tie them together into a functional dynamic DNS setup for your LAN so that DHCP clients self-register with DNS, and you always have working forward and reverse DNS lookups. This article is intended to be part one of a two-part series, and in part two, we’ll combine our bind DNS instance with an ACME-enabled LAN certificate authority and set up LetsEncrypt-style auto-renewing certificates for LAN services.

If that sounds like a fun couple of weekend projects, you’re in the right place! If you want to fast-forward to where we start installing stuff, skip down a couple of subheds to the tutorial-y bits. Now, excuse me while I babble about my personal life.

My name is Lee, and I have a problem

(Hi, Lee.)

I am a tinkering homelab sysadmin forever chasing the enterprise dragon. My understanding of what "normal" means, in terms of the things I should be able to do in any minimally functioning networking environment, was formed in the days just before and just after 9/11, when I was a fledgling admin fresh out of college, working at an enormous company that made planes starting with the number "7." I tutored at the knees of a whole bunch of different mentor sysadmins, who ranged on the graybeard scale from "fairly normal, just writes his own custom GURPS campaigns" to "lives in a Unabomber cabin in the woods and will only communicate via GPG." If there was one consistent refrain throughout my formative years marinating in that enterprise IT soup, it was that forward and reverse DNS should always work. Why? Because just like a clean bathroom is generally a sign of a nice restaurant, having good, functional DNS (forward and reverse) is a sign that your IT team knows what it’s doing.

Just look at what the masses have to contend with outside of the datacenter, where madness reigns. Look at the state of the average user’s LAN—is there even a search domain configured? Do reverse queries on dynamic hosts work? Do forward queries on dynamic hosts even work? How can anyone live like this?!

I decided long ago that I didn’t have to, so I’ve maintained a linked bind and dhcpd setup on my LAN for more than ten years. Also, I have control issues, and I like my home LAN to function like the well-run enterprise LANs I used to spend my days administering. It’s kind of like how car people think: If you’re not driving a stick shift, you’re not really driving. I have the same kind of dumb hang-up, but for network services.

Honestly, though, running your LAN with bind and dhcpd isn’t even that much work—those two applications underpin a huge part of the modern Internet. The packaged versions that come with most modern Linux distros are ready to go out of the box. They certainly beat the pants off of the minimal DNS/DHCP services offered by most SOHO NAT routers. Once you have bind and dhcpd configured, they’re bulletproof. The only time I interact with my setup is if I need to add a new static DHCP mapping for a host I want to always grab the same IP address.

So, hey, if the idea of having perfect forward and reverse DNS lookups on your LAN sounds exciting—and, come on, who doesn’t want that?!—then pull up your terminal and strap in because we’re going make it happen.

(Note that I’m relying a bit on Past Lee and this old blog entry for some of the explanations in this piece, so if any of the three people who read my blog notice any similarities in some of the text, it’s because Past Lee wrote it first and I am absolutely stealing from him.)

But wait, there’s more!

This piece is intended to be part one of two. If the idea of having one’s own bind and dhcpd servers sounds a little silly (and it’s not—it’s awesome), it’s actually a prerequisite for an additional future project with serious practical implications: our own fully functioning local ACME-enabled certificate authority capable of answering DNS-01 challenges so we can issue our own certificates to LAN services and not have to deal with TLS warnings like plebes.

("But Lee," you say, "why not just use actual-for-real LetsEncrypt with a real domain on my LAN?" Because that’s considerably more complicated to implement if one does it the right way, and it means potentially dealing with split-horizon DNS and hairpinning if you also need to use that domain for any Internet-accessible stuff. Split-horizon DNS is handy and useful if you have requirements that demand it, but if you’re a home user, you probably don’t. We’ll keep this as simple as possible and use LAN-specific DNS zones rather than real public domain names.)

We’ll tackle all the certificate stuff in part two—because we have a ways to go before we can get there.