Johnathan Corgan
682d7be69a
A process started by the service control manager has no standard handles, and writes to its absent stdout report success, so everything the daemon logged in service mode was lost. So were config-load failures, the service's own error report and panic messages, which all went to stderr. In service mode the daemon now logs to C:\ProgramData\fips\fips.log. The file is rolled at 10 MiB with four old files kept, so it takes at most about 50 MiB. A roll that fails, for example because another process holds the file, keeps writing to the current file and is not retried until another 10 MiB have been written. Config-load failures, the service error and panic messages go to the same file. A foreground run still logs to the console, and --install-service names the log file. The writer is built in rather than taken from a crate, so it is tested on every platform and adds no dependency. The Windows ZIP's README and the fips reference now say where the service log goes, and install-service.ps1 prints the log path.
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.