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Johnathan Corgan 6a564e26ac Prepare the v0.5.0 release content

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.

2026-08-30 10:42:59 +00:00

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Reach Services on Other Mesh Nodes

In join-the-test-mesh you used ping6 to reach test-us01 and test-us02 by their .fips names. This tutorial generalizes that to any IPv6-capable tool you already use — nc, traceroute6, curl, ssh, scp, anything — and gets you comfortable with the daemon's IPv6 adapter, which makes the FIPS mesh look like an ordinary IPv6 network to applications that already know how to use IPv6.

The whole exercise should take about ten minutes.

What you'll do

You'll ping a mesh node (recap), attempt a TCP connection to it with nc, and trace the packet path with traceroute6 — all by hostname. By the end you will have driven three different IPv6 tools at a mesh address and seen each one work the same way it works on the regular internet.

An IPv6 adapter for a non-IPv6 mesh. The FIPS network itself routes blobs of data between npub-addressed nodes; on its own it has nothing to do with IPv6. The daemon includes an IPv6 adapter that presents the mesh as an ordinary IPv6 interface (fips0), so existing IP software works without modification. The kernel routes packets to it, applications open IPv6 sockets through it, and the adapter handles encapsulating each packet and routing it through the mesh to the matching adapter on the other side. Any tool that speaks IPv6 works unchanged.

The IPv6 adapter is currently the main way operators use the FIPS network, which is why most of the new-user progression is about it. Native applications can use the mesh without going through IPv6 at all, but that is out of scope for this tutorial.

Addressing a mesh node

Throughout this tutorial — and any time you reach across the mesh — use a node's .fips hostname directly. There are two forms:

<npub>.fips — the canonical form. Every node has one, always. This is the long bech32 npub with .fips appended.
<shortname>.fips — the convenience form, if you (or the package) have an entry for the node in /etc/fips/hosts. The installer ships entries for the public test mesh, so test-us01.fips works on a fresh install.

These are real hostnames as far as your kernel is concerned. Pass them to any IPv6-capable tool — ping6, nc, curl, ssh, traceroute6, anything — the same way you would pass a hostname on the public internet. There is no separate "resolve to address first" step you ever need to perform; if the tool takes a hostname, it accepts a .fips hostname.

Where the address comes from. Every FIPS node's mesh address is 0xfd (the fd00::/8 ULA prefix) followed by the first 15 bytes of its node address, which is itself the first 16 bytes of SHA-256 of its public key. The remaining bytes are hash output, so an address like fd97:... is per-node — the 97 is part of the hash, not a fixed prefix shared across nodes. Names of the form <npub>.fips and any shortname mapped in /etc/fips/hosts are aliases for that address. The daemon's local DNS responder hands the answer back to your kernel without ever talking to a remote DNS server.

Step 1: Ping a mesh node (recap)

ping6 -c 4 test-us01.fips

You did this in join-the-test-mesh. Four replies, RTT in the tens of milliseconds (depending on where you are relative to test-us01). Nothing new — but it confirms the mesh data plane is healthy before you try anything else.

Step 2: Attempt a TCP connection

ping6 proves ICMPv6 reaches the destination. To prove TCP reaches it, use nc (netcat) to attempt a connection to a port. Pick any port — whether it has a service listening or not, the attempt proves the data plane carries your TCP segments end-to-end:

nc -6 -vz test-us01.fips 22 2>&1

You will see one of two outcomes:

Connection to test-us01.fips 22 port [tcp/ssh] succeeded!

or:

nc: connect to test-us01.fips port 22 (tcp) failed: Connection refused

Both are good. The first means a service is listening on that port and accepted your TCP handshake. The second means your TCP SYN reached the remote node's kernel, which sent back a TCP RST because no service was bound — and that RST traveled all the way back through the mesh to your nc process.

What a Connection refused proves. A connection-refused response is not a network failure. It means the destination host is alive and reachable, the TCP stack on the far end processed your SYN, and the reply made it home. Compare with what you would get if the address were unreachable: Network is unreachable or a timeout. Either of the two outcomes above demonstrates a working end-to-end TCP path.

If the port you tried happens to have a service, attach - instead of -z and you can read the banner directly:

nc -6 -v test-us01.fips 22

The remote node's SSH banner, if any, will print on the next line. Type Ctrl-C to disconnect — you have not authenticated, just banner-grabbed.

If nc is not installed, the same demonstration works with curl against TCP/80:

curl -6 -v --connect-timeout 5 http://test-us01.fips/ 2>&1 | head

The TCP connection result is in the first few lines of curl's verbose output. The HTTP response code is irrelevant — what matters is whether the connection itself succeeded.

Step 3: Trace the path

traceroute6 shows the IPv6 hops between you and a destination:

traceroute6 -n test-us02.fips

You will see exactly one line — test-us02's mesh address. That is the only IPv6 hop between your fips0 and test-us02's fips0, even though at the FIPS-mesh layer your packet is being forwarded through your peer test-us01 on the way to test-us02. The mesh-layer forwarding is invisible to traceroute6 because it lives below the IPv6 adapter.

Two layers, two ideas of "hop". The FIPS mesh routes blobs between npub-addressed nodes and can pass through several intermediate peers — your packet to test-us02 is handed off to test-us01 first. The IPv6 adapter, sitting on top of that, presents every reachable mesh node as a direct IPv6 neighbor: one hop, on a flat fabric. From traceroute6's perspective the multi-hop FIPS path is hidden — it sees only the source and destination IPv6 adapters. To see what's happening at the mesh layer, see ipv6-adapter-walkthrough, which traces one ssh request from DNS query to far-side TUN with fipstop and fipsctl running alongside.

If traceroute6 is not installed, mtr and other IPv6 path tools produce the same single-hop result. The single-hop behavior is a property of the IPv6 adapter, not of the tool.

What you've learned

You have driven three IPv6 tools at mesh nodes you reach over the mesh, all by .fips hostname, and they all worked the same way they work everywhere else:

Addressing. <npub>.fips is the canonical hostname for any node; <shortname>.fips is the convenience form when /etc/fips/hosts has an entry. Use these in any tool that takes an IPv6 hostname — there is no separate resolution step you ever need to perform.
Reachability. ping6 confirms the remote node's fips0 answers ICMPv6 echo from your fips0.
TCP. nc confirms TCP segments traverse the mesh and the far side responds (whether with a banner, a refusal, or a service of its own).
Path. traceroute6 shows exactly one IPv6 hop to any reachable mesh node, because the multi-hop FIPS-mesh-layer forwarding lives below the IPv6 adapter and is invisible to IPv6 tooling.

The conceptual takeaway is the one in the callout at the top: the daemon's IPv6 adapter takes care of presenting the FIPS mesh as ordinary IPv6 to every tool you already know. To consume any service hosted on any mesh node — SSH, HTTP, file transfer, custom protocols — you use the IPv6 client you would use anywhere else. The hostname looks unusual (<npub>.fips), but the API surface is unchanged.

Troubleshooting

If a tool reports "Network is unreachable" or hangs:

Confirm the link is healthy. sudo fipsctl show peers should show test-us01 with active connectivity. If the link to your direct peer is down, nothing past it is reachable.
Confirm fips0 is up. ip -6 addr show fips0 should show one fd97:... address. If fips0 is missing, the daemon did not bring up the TUN — verify the daemon is running with the privileges it needs. The default is to run as root; if you dropped privileges per ../how-to/run-as-unprivileged-user.md, re-check that the setcap and systemd override survived your last package upgrade.
Confirm the name resolves. If ping6 test-us01.fips fails with unknown host or Name or service not known, the system resolver is not consulting the daemon's .fips responder. The installer wires this up automatically; the "Reaching mesh nodes by name" section of ../getting-started.md describes what the wiring looks like and how to confirm it.

If nc or curl reports a timeout (rather than a refusal or success), the destination node is unreachable from your daemon — possible mesh-routing transient. Try again, or ping first: if ping6 succeeds but TCP times out, it is the specific port being filtered on the destination, not a path problem.

What's next

host-a-service — Bring up a small HTTP server on your node, bind it to fips0 so it is mesh-only, and confirm another mesh node (or your own machine) can reach it through the same data plane you just exercised. Covers bind-interface choice and the mesh firewall.

For "what's actually in those packets":

../design/fips-architecture.md — the protocol stack and the two-layer encryption model.
../design/fips-mesh-layer.md — Noise IK link encryption, hop-by-hop forwarding.
../design/fips-session-layer.md — end-to-end Noise XK between source and destination.

For the trace-it-yourself version of the path you just exercised, see ipv6-adapter-walkthrough, which walks one ssh from DNS query through session setup to the far-side TUN with fipstop and fipsctl running alongside.

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