Johnathan Corgan
22372018bd
Carries the per-peer medium-change probe, the work written on top of it, and the heartbeat-send accounting fix that came up from the maintenance line. Every source file merged without a conflict, because this line had not touched any of them. The changelog was the only conflict, in two hunks, and one of them was not the union it looked like. The first was: this line's own Fixed entries and the other line's Node lifecycle subsection are both additions, and both are kept. The second was not. The medium-change detection entry already existed here, inherited when this line last took a merge, and the other side was offering the same entry with an upgrade note appended rather than a new one. Taking both would have described the feature twice, once with the note and once without, so the older copy is replaced in place and stays under Added where it belongs. That note is the part with a consequence, and it now reaches this line too: with detection on by default, a node that shortened its liveness timeout to one or two seconds for fast failover is refused at startup after the upgrade, citing a key its operator never set.
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.
Releases
If you want the notes for a particular version — what changed, what broke, and what to do about it on upgrade — go here.