Johnathan Corgan
84976b1fa2
The resolver ran as a detached task whose error was only logged, so a gateway whose DNS port was taken stayed up with .fips resolution dead and every health check passing. The listener is now bound before the address pool, NAT table and routes are created, and a bind failure exits with status 1. When the port is already in use, the error names the service most likely to hold it and how to find the holder with ss or netstat. A resolver task that stops while the gateway runs also ends the process, after NAT and routes are torn down, so systemd or procd restarts it or shows it failed. The resolver now forwards to the upstream address the startup probe resolved, so an upstream written as a hostname no longer passes the probe and then kills the resolver. The dns-resolver harness gains a check that a gateway configured on the daemon's DNS port exits with the hint before it creates the pool or the NAT table. The troubleshooting guide describes the new failure, and the exit-code table no longer lists a control-socket bind failure, which only warns.
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.