Arjen
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The transport-layer design gains an Interface Presence section: the three deployment scenarios that motivated it, the presence machine and its two invariants, why presence is IFF_UP and not IFF_UP|IFF_RUNNING, interface identity and the recreated-netdev case, the detection sources and their two rate limits, the optional policy, health as a level rather than a latch, the egress-MTU consequence, the logging rules, and what the mechanism retires. It records why the error deadline is a single ten-second window rather than a repeating severity ladder, so the ladder does not come back. The control-socket and fipsctl references described show_transports without its `interface` block, and the transport-layer state machine still implied that Up meant bound. Both now say what Up and presence each describe and how they differ, since "transport up, interface absent" is a normal state an operator will meet and would otherwise read as a contradiction. The configuration reference documents `optional` with the absence, log and retry behaviour of each setting, and the ground-up tutorial's dongle example gains optional: true, which is what that example is actually for.
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.