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Johnathan Corgan
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Everything the release needs except the version number, which stays at 0.5.0-dev until the tag. The changelog entry covers only the work that is new on this line. The point release's forty-six entries arrived under their own heading with the forward merge and are left alone; the twenty that remained are regrouped by topic and eight more added for changes no entry covered. Three of those eight matter to someone upgrading. Five root modules and four re-exports left the public library surface and Node::connections narrowed, none of it recorded anywhere; the entry names what to use instead and distinguishes the removed connection-phase enum from the Noise type of the same name, which is a different type that still exists. Tracing targets moved, so an existing RUST_LOG filter stops matching rather than erroring. And the handshake resend interval key no longer governs the first resend, which is now a constant, though it still governs later ones. Seven more entries cover the work that landed after the first content pass was written: the experimental native datagram API, the fipsctl probe diagnostic, per-instance transport addressing, the app-owned UDP socket seam, and the connect, disconnect and path-MTU fixes. The four bug fixes among them all reach the deployed line, so the release notes no longer claim this release carries exactly one fix for a shipped bug; it carries four. There is no security section, because after the split every security entry belongs to the point release. The release notes say so plainly rather than leaving a reader upgrading across both releases to conclude this one carries no security work. The notes are organized by audience, since the release spans OpenWrt routers, embedders, FreeBSD, and the existing platforms, and a single list serves none of them. The native datagram API is given a section of its own rather than folded into the embedding seam: it is a client-facing API rather than a way to host a node, and its one rule with no Berkeley-socket counterpart, that the v1 wire carries no half-close, needs to be somewhere a client author will read it. FreeBSD is advertised as supported on x86_64 only, stated wherever the platform appears. Android is advertised as an embedding seam and not as a supported platform: a compile-gated library surface with no artifact and no host application guide. The configuration table rename is carried through every shipped file that taught the old spelling: nine documentation files, the OpenWrt sample config and a test generator, twenty-two sites in all. Guides written this same cycle were among them, which is how the omission was found. The documentation that arrived with the native API was checked for the same omission and was already clean. The compatibility tests keep the old spelling deliberately, since they exist to test the fold. The changelog section is the fold of master's [Unreleased], not a snapshot of it. An earlier version of this commit took a copy that then drifted, so each section ended up holding a bullet the other did not and re-folding them would have picked a winner silently. Both causes were fixed on master instead — the NixOS module had never been recorded there, and the pre-release batch of fixes was new — so [Unreleased] is a strict superset and this is a copy rather than a merge. [0.5.0] carries all forty-six bullets byte for byte, [Unreleased] is empty, and [0.4.2] is untouched, checked by hashing it against master's copy. The BLE work landed after the content pass and gets one summary entry in the changelog and one section in the release notes rather than nine bullets: the ble_available gate replacing target_os = "linux", packet-boundary recovery for stream-oriented backends, peer recognition by node identity instead of a rotating link address, the L2CAP PSM moving into the backend seam and onto the advertisement, the embedder-supplied Android radio, bounded probe retry, and inbound handshakes moved off the accept loop. The two release-notes copies no longer share their link paths. Relative links resolve from one directory only, so the seven written for docs/releases/ all 404ed from the root copy. The root copy now uses paths from the repository root and the versioned copy keeps the ../ form; both sets were resolved against the tree. The same two links are broken the same way in the v0.4.0 through v0.4.2 notes, left as shipped history. The contributor tallies are re-derived against maint..HEAD rather than adjusted: twenty commits from outside the project and 171 from me, with Arjen at fifteen and fr34aky at two. An earlier count of twelve and 138 was carried from a measurement taken three days before this content was written, and the BLE branch widened the gap after it. Arjen's NixOS flake module, the UDP sin6_scope_id fix and most of the BLE rework were uncredited, as was fr34aky's L2CAP PSM seam. They want one last re-derive at tag time if anything lands before the tag. A sweep of all 99 tracked markdown files against the tree corrected fifty-three of them. Four told the reader to run a build.sh that does not exist; the only harness builder is testing/scripts/build.sh. The BLE build prerequisites were described as optional on the strength of a probe that build.rs does not perform, and bluez was named a build prerequisite when libdbus-sys asks only for libdbus-1-dev and pkg-config and bluez is the runtime daemon. Link cost is the primary sort key in next-hop ranking, not reserved for future use; Ethernet runs on macOS as well as Linux; the BLE MTU is the L2CAP CoC MTU rather than a negotiated ATT_MTU; effective Ethernet MTU is 1497; the LAN discovery subsystem is src/mdns and eight citations still named a src/discovery that never existed here. The connectivity states in three tutorials were invented, and their jq filters matched nothing including healthy peers. One command filtered on a literal fd97: address prefix, which only the first byte of fixes, so it returned empty for all but one reader in 256 and every later step using the variable failed silently. transports.tor.advertise_on_nostr was undocumented despite being validated against node.rendezvous.nostr.enabled. The transport design document gains the BLE section it never had, written from the source: the backend cascade and its compile_error tripwire, the platform gate, the PSM advertisement wire layout and the byte budget that forces a 16-bit service-data key, and the probe and admission bounds. Three source files carried the same class of staleness and are corrected with the documentation: the OpenWrt ipk usage line and Makefile error text both named a packaging/openwrt that does not exist, and chaos.sh parsed --subnet without listing it. Folded in with the content commit, having been prepared alongside it: The three GitHub Action pins that had gone stale. Every third-party action is pinned to a commit SHA, nothing reports that a pin has aged, and re-resolving all ten against their tags found dorny/test-reporter@v2, taiki-e/install-action@v2 and vmactions/freebsd-vm@v1 had moved. The three install-action@nextest references stay unpinned, since that action reads the tool to install from the ref name. check-action-pins.sh passes at 75 references and all nine workflow files parse. The lockfile refresh, which is the mutating half of the dependency sweep. Thirty-six packages move to their latest semver-compatible versions and every one is transitive; nothing declared in Cargo.toml changes version. No advisory forces any of them. It was taken before the validation battery, because a gate run against a lockfile that later moves proves nothing about what ships. The sha2 0.10 to 0.11, hkdf 0.12 to 0.13 and bech32 0.11 to 0.12 majors, three of the four deferred at v0.4.0 for change surface rather than security. All three land with no source change. sha2 and hkdf must move together, since both depend on digest 0.11, and neither changes an algorithm. That matters because the chaining-key KDF in the Noise handshake is built on Hkdf::<Sha256>, where an output change would be a wire break rather than a compile error; no known-answer vectors exist for that path, so the wire-compatibility gate is what covers it. secp256k1 0.31 is deliberately absent, since nostr's own requirement would leave two copies of the ECC library in the tree. The README support matrix, rebuilt as one feature table broken out by Linux variety. A single Linux column hid that Debian, Ubuntu, Arch and NixOS are one glibc build differing in packaging, that OpenWrt is musl and drops BLE, and that Android is not a daemon platform. Transport rows sort by how many platforms carry them. A Native API row reads its platform set from the cfg gates. The installer row becomes a package format row naming the artifact, and only the .deb is exercised per release. Four changelog and release-note gaps the BLE re-walk found: a Bluetooth LE bullet stranded inside the released 0.4.2 section, a missing Fixed entry for the scan and probe loop counting a pool-refused connection as an established link, the unnamed embedder call that installs an application-owned radio, and the fact that stopping the transport now stops scanning as well as advertising. Three release-document gaps found walking the unsurveyed commits: the UDP reuse-flag fix stated in the direction opposite to the one it was made, with the silent second-daemon bind it prevents left unsaid; the corrected native-API socket paragraph carried into both release-note copies, which still named SOCK_SEQPACKET on FreeBSD and two kernels where three are handled; and the coordinate-cache hardening, which shipped with no text anywhere despite adding four operator-visible status fields. That last entry states plainly that the checks are mitigations and not a closure, since the coordinate is still not authenticated. Also folded in, the documentation pass that followed the content commit: A stage-pipeline diagram for the probe, embedded in the fipsctl reference under the five-stage list. It draws the five stages left to right with each stage's failure reasons below it, and the bypass that skips both lookup stages when the coordinates are cached or the target is a direct peer. Its branches come from the probe state machine rather than from the report, so the path stage is drawn as the one failure that does not stop the probe. A rewrite of the README's "What FIPS does" section. It now opens with what a machine running FIPS gets, rather than with the two deployment modes, and gives the self-organizing and permissionless property its own paragraph since it holds for both modes. A regrouping of the README's feature list into the mesh, getting traffic onto it, and running a node, with a bullet added for the native datagram API, which had none despite sitting in the support matrix. The Quick start now leads with the released packages rather than a source build. It also fixes a real defect: the package enables fips.service and fips-dns.service and starts neither on a fresh install, so .fips name resolution was silently dead until the next reboot and neither page said to start the service. A rewrite of the release notes. They opened with seven subsections of upgrade caveats and reached the first feature two hundred lines in; they now open with a summary of the release and elaborate below it in the same order. Android is stated as supported through an embedded crate rather than as a standalone daemon, consistently across all three documents. The OpenWrt pair is corrected: it is 802.11s between routers with FIPS supplying encryption, authentication and routing, plus a convention of an open !FIPS SSID a client joins over WiFi, not meshing over a router's own radios. The probe's path output is described as the least-common-ancestor walk, which is the worst-case fallback route rather than the route a packet takes. Detail that did not change what a reader does was cut from the notes and kept in the changelog.
257 lines
10 KiB
Markdown
257 lines
10 KiB
Markdown
# Reach Services on Other Mesh Nodes
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In [join-the-test-mesh](join-the-test-mesh.md) you used `ping6`
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to reach `test-us01` and `test-us02` by their `.fips` names.
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This tutorial generalizes that to any IPv6-capable tool you
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already use — `nc`, `traceroute6`, `curl`, `ssh`, `scp`,
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anything — and gets you comfortable with the daemon's IPv6
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adapter, which makes the FIPS mesh look like an ordinary IPv6
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network to applications that already know how to use IPv6.
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The whole exercise should take about ten minutes.
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## What you'll do
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You'll ping a mesh node (recap), attempt a TCP connection to it
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with `nc`, and trace the packet path with `traceroute6` — all
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by hostname. By the end you will have driven three different
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IPv6 tools at a mesh address and seen each one work the same
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way it works on the regular internet.
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> **An IPv6 adapter for a non-IPv6 mesh.** The FIPS network
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> itself routes blobs of data between npub-addressed nodes;
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> on its own it has nothing to do with IPv6. The daemon
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> includes an *IPv6 adapter* that presents the mesh as an
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> ordinary IPv6 interface (`fips0`), so existing IP software
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> works without modification. The kernel routes packets to
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> it, applications open IPv6 sockets through it, and the
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> adapter handles encapsulating each packet and routing it
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> through the mesh to the matching adapter on the other side.
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> Any tool that speaks IPv6 works unchanged.
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The IPv6 adapter is currently the main way operators use the
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FIPS network, which is why most of the new-user progression is
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about it. Native applications can use the mesh without going
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through IPv6 at all, but that is out of scope for this tutorial.
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## Addressing a mesh node
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Throughout this tutorial — and any time you reach across the
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mesh — use a node's `.fips` hostname directly. There are two
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forms:
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- **`<npub>.fips`** — the canonical form. Every node has one,
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always. This is the long bech32 npub with `.fips` appended.
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- **`<shortname>.fips`** — the convenience form, *if* you (or
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the package) have an entry for the node in
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`/etc/fips/hosts`. The installer ships entries for the
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public test mesh, so `test-us01.fips` works on a fresh
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install.
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These are real hostnames as far as your kernel is concerned.
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Pass them to any IPv6-capable tool — `ping6`, `nc`, `curl`,
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`ssh`, `traceroute6`, anything — the same way you would pass a
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hostname on the public internet. There is no separate
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"resolve to address first" step you ever need to perform; if
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the tool takes a hostname, it accepts a `.fips` hostname.
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> **Where the address comes from.** Every FIPS node's mesh
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> address is `0xfd` (the `fd00::/8` ULA prefix) followed by the
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> first 15 bytes of its node address, which is itself the first
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> 16 bytes of SHA-256 of its public key. The remaining bytes
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> are hash output, so an address like `fd97:...` is per-node —
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> the `97` is part of the hash, not a fixed prefix shared across
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> nodes. Names of the form `<npub>.fips` and any shortname
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> mapped in `/etc/fips/hosts` are aliases for that address. The
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> daemon's local DNS responder hands the answer back to your
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> kernel without ever talking to a remote DNS server.
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## Step 1: Ping a mesh node (recap)
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```sh
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ping6 -c 4 test-us01.fips
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```
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You did this in [join-the-test-mesh](join-the-test-mesh.md).
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Four replies, RTT in the tens of milliseconds (depending on
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where you are relative to `test-us01`). Nothing new — but it
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confirms the mesh data plane is healthy before you try
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anything else.
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## Step 2: Attempt a TCP connection
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`ping6` proves ICMPv6 reaches the destination. To prove TCP
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reaches it, use `nc` (netcat) to attempt a connection to a port.
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Pick any port — whether it has a service listening or not, the
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attempt proves the data plane carries your TCP segments
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end-to-end:
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```sh
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nc -6 -vz test-us01.fips 22 2>&1
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```
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You will see one of two outcomes:
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```text
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Connection to test-us01.fips 22 port [tcp/ssh] succeeded!
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```
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or:
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```text
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nc: connect to test-us01.fips port 22 (tcp) failed: Connection refused
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```
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Both are good. The first means a service is listening on that
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port and accepted your TCP handshake. The second means your TCP
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SYN reached the remote node's kernel, which sent back a TCP RST
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because no service was bound — and that RST traveled all the way
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back through the mesh to your `nc` process.
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> **What a `Connection refused` proves.** A connection-refused
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> response is *not* a network failure. It means the destination
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> host is alive and reachable, the TCP stack on the far end
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> processed your SYN, and the reply made it home. Compare with
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> what you would get if the address were unreachable:
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> `Network is unreachable` or a timeout. Either of the two
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> outcomes above demonstrates a working end-to-end TCP path.
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If the port you tried happens to have a service, attach `-`
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instead of `-z` and you can read the banner directly:
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```sh
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nc -6 -v test-us01.fips 22
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```
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The remote node's SSH banner, if any, will print on the next
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line. Type `Ctrl-C` to disconnect — you have not authenticated,
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just banner-grabbed.
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If `nc` is not installed, the same demonstration works with
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`curl` against TCP/80:
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```sh
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curl -6 -v --connect-timeout 5 http://test-us01.fips/ 2>&1 | head
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```
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The TCP connection result is in the first few lines of `curl`'s
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verbose output. The HTTP response code is irrelevant — what
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matters is whether the connection itself succeeded.
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## Step 3: Trace the path
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`traceroute6` shows the IPv6 hops between you and a
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destination:
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```sh
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traceroute6 -n test-us02.fips
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```
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You will see exactly one line — `test-us02`'s mesh address.
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That is the only IPv6 hop between your `fips0` and
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`test-us02`'s `fips0`, even though at the FIPS-mesh layer
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your packet is being forwarded through your peer `test-us01`
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on the way to `test-us02`. The mesh-layer forwarding is
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invisible to `traceroute6` because it lives below the IPv6
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adapter.
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> **Two layers, two ideas of "hop".** The FIPS mesh routes
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> blobs between npub-addressed nodes and can pass through
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> several intermediate peers — your packet to `test-us02` is
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> handed off to `test-us01` first. The IPv6 adapter, sitting
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> on top of that, presents every reachable mesh node as a
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> direct IPv6 neighbor: one hop, on a flat fabric. From
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> `traceroute6`'s perspective the multi-hop FIPS path is
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> hidden — it sees only the source and destination IPv6
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> adapters. To see what's happening at the mesh layer, see
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> [ipv6-adapter-walkthrough](ipv6-adapter-walkthrough.md),
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> which traces one `ssh` request from DNS query to far-side
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> TUN with `fipstop` and `fipsctl` running alongside.
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If `traceroute6` is not installed, `mtr` and other IPv6 path
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tools produce the same single-hop result. The single-hop
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behavior is a property of the IPv6 adapter, not of the tool.
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## What you've learned
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You have driven three IPv6 tools at mesh nodes you reach over
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the mesh, all by `.fips` hostname, and they all worked the same
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way they work everywhere else:
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- **Addressing.** `<npub>.fips` is the canonical hostname for
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any node; `<shortname>.fips` is the convenience form when
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`/etc/fips/hosts` has an entry. Use these in any tool that
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takes an IPv6 hostname — there is no separate resolution
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step you ever need to perform.
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- **Reachability.** `ping6` confirms the remote node's `fips0`
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answers ICMPv6 echo from your `fips0`.
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- **TCP.** `nc` confirms TCP segments traverse the mesh and the
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far side responds (whether with a banner, a refusal, or a
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service of its own).
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- **Path.** `traceroute6` shows exactly one IPv6 hop to any
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reachable mesh node, because the multi-hop FIPS-mesh-layer
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forwarding lives below the IPv6 adapter and is invisible
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to IPv6 tooling.
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The conceptual takeaway is the one in the callout at the top:
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the daemon's IPv6 adapter takes care of presenting the FIPS
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mesh as ordinary IPv6 to every tool you already know. To
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consume any service hosted on any mesh node — SSH, HTTP, file
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transfer, custom protocols — you use the IPv6 client you
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would use anywhere else. The hostname looks unusual
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(`<npub>.fips`), but the API surface is unchanged.
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## Troubleshooting
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If a tool reports "Network is unreachable" or hangs:
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- **Confirm the link is healthy.**
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`sudo fipsctl show peers` should show `test-us01` with active
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connectivity. If the link to your direct peer is down, nothing
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past it is reachable.
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- **Confirm `fips0` is up.** `ip -6 addr show fips0` should show
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one `fd97:...` address. If `fips0` is missing, the daemon did
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not bring up the TUN — verify the daemon is running with the
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privileges it needs. The default is to run as root; if you
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dropped privileges per
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[../how-to/run-as-unprivileged-user.md](../how-to/run-as-unprivileged-user.md),
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re-check that the `setcap` and systemd override survived your
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last package upgrade.
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- **Confirm the name resolves.** If `ping6 test-us01.fips`
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fails with `unknown host` or `Name or service not known`,
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the system resolver is not consulting the daemon's `.fips`
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responder. The installer wires this up automatically; the
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"Reaching mesh nodes by name" section of
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[../getting-started.md](../getting-started.md) describes
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what the wiring looks like and how to confirm it.
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If `nc` or `curl` reports a timeout (rather than a refusal or
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success), the destination node is unreachable from your
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daemon — possible mesh-routing transient. Try again, or ping
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first: if `ping6` succeeds but TCP times out, it is the
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specific port being filtered on the destination, not a path
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problem.
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## What's next
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- [host-a-service](host-a-service.md) — Bring up a small HTTP
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server on your node, bind it to `fips0` so it is mesh-only,
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and confirm another mesh node (or your own machine) can
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reach it through the same data plane you just exercised.
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Covers bind-interface choice and the mesh firewall.
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For "what's actually in those packets":
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- [../design/fips-architecture.md](../design/fips-architecture.md)
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— the protocol stack and the two-layer encryption model.
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- [../design/fips-mesh-layer.md](../design/fips-mesh-layer.md) —
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Noise IK link encryption, hop-by-hop forwarding.
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- [../design/fips-session-layer.md](../design/fips-session-layer.md)
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— end-to-end Noise XK between source and destination.
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For the trace-it-yourself version of the path you just
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exercised, see
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[ipv6-adapter-walkthrough](ipv6-adapter-walkthrough.md), which
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walks one `ssh` from DNS query through session setup to the
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far-side TUN with `fipstop` and `fipsctl` running alongside.
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