Move the staged changelog entries under a 0.5.2 heading dated 2026-09-28
and leave an empty Unreleased section above it. The date is provisional:
a comment beside the heading says so, and the two release-notes files
carry the same date with the same marker, so the check at the version
bump finds all three.
Add the release notes and mirror them byte for byte to RELEASE-NOTES.md.
Every link is absolute so the Release body resolves them, and each
paragraph and list item is on one line, because the Release page shows
every newline inside a paragraph as a line break; the file exempts
itself from the line-length lint rule. The notes lead with who should
upgrade and with the three defaults that changed: the gateway's DNS
port, the Windows config directory, and an ephemeral node no longer
writing its key file. They say what was measured and what was not,
including the mixed-version interop run against v0.5.1 and v0.5.0, the
Windows installer checks on Windows Server under Windows PowerShell 5.1
and PowerShell 7, and the checks still outstanding. They state that a
link to a v0.5.0 or v0.5.1 node can still drop after a lost rekey reply
until that node is upgraded, since the fix is on the answering side.
The Windows upgrade notes say to stop the service before every run of
the installer, and to move fips.yaml and fips.key from \etc\fips into
C:\ProgramData\fips before upgrading a service that was set up by hand
to read its config from \etc\fips, which otherwise comes up under a new
identity with no warning.
The README's status badge, release-notes link and status paragraph
follow the release.
Correct documentation that no longer matches the gateway, tree, Windows
and packaging behavior:
- The gateway design document, how-to, OpenWrt tutorial and the
configuration reference describe the NAT rebuild as one transaction,
the 1000-mapping ceiling and the new-name rate limit in place of the
pool size as a hard cap, and which DNS queries allocate a mapping.
- The spanning-tree documents describe the periodic re-broadcast and
the resend of an unconfirmed announce, and the bloom filter update
triggers include a parent switch and a child joining or leaving.
- The fips, fipsctl and security references cover the restricted
C:\ProgramData\fips on Windows, the ACL and key paths on macOS,
FreeBSD and Windows, the legacy peer ACL fallback in \etc\fips, and
the Debian fips.yaml's actual mode and conffile status.
- The packaging guides no longer list MIPS as supported, the arm64 .deb
leg is described as also purging the package, and the OpenWrt SDK-feed
README says a package built from its Makefile carries none of the
released packages' maintainer scripts.
- The testing README gains a section for the OpenWrt maintainer-script
suite and says the ACL allowlist suite runs by hand only, and the
interop README lists the mesh-size check as its eighth phase.
The upgrade notes were then corrected where following them as written
would have left a node worse off:
- Gateway DNS port: a fips.yaml that sets gateway.dns.listen keeps its
port through the upgrade, and the v0.5.1 example config and deployment
guide set it to [::1]:5353, so the resolver instruction depends on
whether the config sets it.
- OpenWrt: an operator who had the gateway disabled must stop it and
then disable it after the first opkg upgrade.
- FreeBSD: an upgrade step that restarts fips and fips_dns; the command
comes from pkg's source and is listed as not measured.
- Debian: the upgrade re-enables and starts fips-dns every time;
`systemctl mask fips-dns` keeps it off. The .deb start bound is 90
seconds for fips-gateway.
- Arch and the systemd tarball: what to restart or start after the
upgrade, and that only a .deb upgrade reloads the firewall.
- Ephemeral nodes: set persistent before upgrading to keep a key.
- Windows: one ordered sequence in an elevated PowerShell, with the
installer run under -ExecutionPolicy Bypass.
- Building from source on glibc Linux also needs libdbus-1-dev and
pkg-config. README, getting-started and the packaging README install
the .deb with apt install ./ and point to the packaging README for
per-format install commands.
The notes record an OpenWrt 24 router test of the gateway DNS port,
and that a gateway that fails to start leaves dnsmasq forwarding .fips
to its port, with how to hand .fips back to the daemon.
Drop the test-us03-next alias from the shipped hosts file and from the
roster in the host-aliases how-to.
Architectural and protocol-level explanations for FIPS — the why
and the how behind the wire and the system. For wire formats and
configuration keys, see reference/. For task
recipes, see how-to/. For end-to-end lessons, see
tutorials/.
Reading Order
Start with fips-concepts.md for the
novice-friendly framing of what FIPS is and why, then move to
fips-architecture.md for the protocol stack,
identity model, and two-layer encryption walkthrough. From there,
follow the protocol stack from bottom to top. After the stack,
fips-mesh-operation.md explains how the
pieces work together at runtime. Cross-cutting and supporting
documents cover specific subsystems in detail.
Johnathan Corgan
9979826235