Johnathan Corgan
0b44c46235
The NAT rebuild listed the LAN-side masquerade last in postrouting, after every per-mapping SNAT. Those SNAT rules match on source address alone and NAT statements are terminal, so an inbound port-forwarded connection from a mesh peer that also held a live .fips mapping was rewritten to the peer's pool address instead of the gateway's LAN address. The LAN target then saw an address that changed as mappings came and went and that only a host routing the pool to the gateway could answer. Emit the LAN masquerade right after the fips0 masquerade, before the mapping rules. Prerouting order and the rule shapes are unchanged. A unit test checks the op order. The gateway suite now checks the order in the kernel's table and adds a phase that probes a port forward while the probing peer holds a live mapping, confirming from conntrack that the reply goes to the gateway's LAN address. The design doc describes the order.
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.