Johnathan Corgan
462b9daf0a
The how-to told an author writing a client in another language that a queued empty datagram leaves the socket with no events pending, while a closed peer sets POLLHUP. That is false, and a client written to it reproduces the defect the receive path has just had fixed, in their code rather than ours. It also told them to poll with an events mask of zero. The library stopped doing that when the macOS port landed, because a poll that requests nothing registers no filter on Darwin and returns no events for a peer that has in fact closed. A client following the old instruction would never detect a close on macOS at all. The reference page carried both errors and asserted that a zero-byte read is an empty datagram and only that. Both pages now describe what the code does. Request POLLIN. Treat a hang-up as end of file only when FIONREAD reports nothing queued behind the read. Design around the one case neither check can resolve, by never giving a zero-length payload a meaning of its own.
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.