Johnathan Corgan
f5be8ec07d
The msg1 rate limiter ran before the established-peer carve-out, so a rekey or restart msg1 arriving on an existing link was refused on exactly the same terms as a stranger's first packet and the carve-out below it never applied to the traffic it was written for. On a node with many peers this refuses a large share of ordinary maintenance traffic: a field node at roughly 245 peers refused 8753 msg1 in 25 minutes, and 159 of the 201 distinct sources were peers it already held sessions with. Classify the source before metering it, and give established-link msg1 its own token bucket instead of a bypass. A bypass was rejected deliberately: the limiter is global precisely because UDP sources are spoofable, and an established-peer exemption is by construction keyed on source address, so metering the exempted class keeps that property where bypassing discards it. The bucket is derived from settings the operator already sets, burst from max_peers and rate from max_peers, the rekey interval and the resend budget, so raising the peer limit sizes it automatically rather than leaving a constant nobody revisits. Both parameters can be set explicitly; an explicit zero burst or non-positive rate is rejected at config validation, because it would refuse every rekey msg1 from an established peer rather than disabling the limit. Split out the established-link test as its own predicate so the rate-limit classifier and the accept_connections gate cannot drift, and convert the limiter's pending slot to a guard released on drop. The slot was previously acquired in one place and released explicitly at eighteen exit paths; once some paths stop acquiring one, any path that still released one would have freed a slot belonging to a different in-flight handshake, lifting effective concurrency above the configured maximum with no counter moving and no log firing. The "Msg1 rate limited" line now reports which limb refused, the pending count or the token bucket, which it did not distinguish before. Classification costs an O(peers) scan on every inbound msg1 including refused ones, where the previous order refused at O(1). The scan is only needed because addr_to_link is keyed on the unresolved dial address; correcting that keying reduces this to a single O(1) lookup. Recorded at the predicate.
FIPS Documentation
FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System) is a self-organizing encrypted mesh network built on Nostr identities, capable of operating over arbitrary transports — local networks, the public internet, Tor, Bluetooth, or point-to-point links — without central infrastructure.
With FIPS, your machine becomes a node in the mesh with a self-generated cryptographic identity. There are two ways to deploy it.
As an overlay on top of existing IP networks, FIPS lets your node reach any other FIPS node wherever it sits — behind a NAT, on a different ISP, on a phone over cellular, on a laptop with only Bluetooth in range, or behind a Tor onion. The mesh forwards IPv6 traffic transparently and end-to-end encrypted, with no central VPN concentrator or coordinating server.
From the ground up over raw Ethernet, WiFi, or Bluetooth, FIPS provides a complete permissionless network without any pre-existing IP infrastructure, ISP, or DNS. Any node that joins the link gets routable IPv6 addresses, peer discovery, and a path to every other node automatically.
Either way, existing networking software runs over it unchanged: SSH, HTTP servers, file transfer, anything IPv6-native works the same way it would on a local network.
New to FIPS? Start with the Getting Started guide.
Documentation Sections
Tutorials
If you are starting from scratch and want a guided path to a working mesh, go here.
How-To Guides
If you have a specific task in mind — enabling a feature, deploying a component, diagnosing a problem — go here.
Reference
If you need to look up wire formats, configuration keys, command flags, or counter inventories, go here.
Design
If you want to understand how the mesh self-organizes, why FIPS makes the choices it does, or how the pieces fit together, go here.