Johnathan Corgan
5a79d3fc5e
Brings up the two release lines' work: the maint harness and guard fixes, the documentation corrections, master's probe, onion and epoch fixes, and both rebuilt changelog blocks. Three conflicts. The readme conflicted on the badge pair. Resolved by taking the Rust badge that no longer asserts a version, since rust-toolchain.toml is the only place that states one, and keeping this line's own v0.6.0-dev status badge. The peer machine conflicted, and the resolution is an adaptation rather than a pick. Master deleted PeerMachine.remote_epoch on the grounds that nothing read it, and that reasoning had to be re-derived here because this line's machine is the XX rewrite and shares almost no text with it. It holds. The shadow's only production write is inbound_msg3, which is where XX crystallizes identity, so it is inbound-only exactly as the msg1 write was on the other lines; conn carries the same value written from both legs, complete_handshake on the outbound one and complete_handshake_msg3 on the inbound; the only read is the cutover action payload, whose executor arm binds nothing; and the live consumer reads conn_remote_epoch. So an initiator cutover, which runs on an outbound machine, carried a zeroed epoch here too. One thing differs and needed handling. This line has an `established` constructor the others do not, and it writes the shadow and conn from the same argument, which would have made the field direction-correct. Its only caller is in the test module and its own doc comment calls the machine inert, so it is a seam that is not wired yet rather than a production path, and it does not rescue the field. Its assignment goes with the rest; the parameter stays, because conn still needs the value. The adaptation is folded into this merge rather than left to a follow-on, because master's half of the same change reached peer_actions.rs through a clean auto-merge. Keeping this line's field while accepting that auto-merge would have left the machine emitting a payload field the executor no longer has, which is a break that only the test build shows. The changelog conflicted because both lines had rebuilt their unreleased block. The Breaking section stays at the top untouched; Unreleased now holds the ten entries that are this line's own; and the other two lines' work sits below under 0.5.0 and 0.4.2 headings, neither dated, matching how master already carries 0.4.2. Four entries existed on both sides in branch-adapted form and were merged rather than picked, so each keeps the rework's wording and this line's accuracy: the OpenWrt entry drops its IK reference, the msg1 classifier keeps the promotion-state paragraph, the SessionAck entry keeps the two XX-only exits, and the msg3 epoch entry counts six sites here against master's five.
Tutorials
If you have just installed FIPS, this is where to start. The tutorials below take you from a freshly-installed daemon to a node that:
- Has joined the public test mesh and can reach other nodes on it.
- Carries a stable identity that other operators can address.
- Discovers peers — and is discoverable — over Nostr.
- Hosts and consumes real services across the mesh.
Each tutorial is a complete, working session at the keyboard. You configure something, restart the daemon, watch it come up, and verify the result. The point is to build muscle memory, not to cover every option.
Read them in order. Each tutorial assumes the state the previous one left you in. If you skip ahead, the cross-references that lead you back may not match what you have on disk.
The new-user progression
| # | Tutorial | What you'll do |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | join-the-test-mesh.md | Add one public test peer to your config, watch the link come up, ping that peer and a second mesh node it routes you to. The starting point for everything else. |
| 2 | persistent-identity.md | Pin your daemon to a stable Nostr keypair so your address stops changing on every restart. Other operators can now add you to their peers: lists; the services you host get a fixed name. |
| 3 | resolve-peers-via-nostr.md | Stop hard-coding peer addresses. Drop the address line from your peer entry and let the daemon look up the current endpoint from public Nostr relays at dial time. |
| 4 | advertise-your-node.md | Publish your own UDP endpoint to Nostr so any operator who knows your npub can reach you, with a short final section on udp:nat best-effort hole-punching for nodes without a directly reachable UDP endpoint. |
| 5 | open-discovery.md | Switch to policy: open and let your peer list populate itself from the ambient fips-overlay-v1 namespace. Hands-off mesh participation. |
| 6 | reach-mesh-services.md | Drive ordinary IPv6 tools — ping6, nc, traceroute6, curl, ssh — at mesh nodes by <npub>.fips. Get a feel for the daemon's IPv6 adapter, which makes unmodified IPv6 software work over the mesh. |
| 7 | host-a-service.md | Bring up an HTTP server bound to fips0 so mesh nodes can reach it, with a deliberate exposure decision (mesh-only vs every interface), and the mesh firewall as a default-deny baseline. The peer ACL (a separate, transport-layer control over which npubs may peer with your node) is briefly mentioned alongside. |
| 8 | ground-up-mesh.md | Bring up a second deployment mode: two devices joined by Ethernet (or WiFi, or BLE) with no IP infrastructure between them. The mesh emerges from layer 2 up. Coexists with overlay peers — the same daemon can carry both. |
After tutorial 8 you have a fully participating mesh node that reaches services hosted by other mesh nodes and hosts services of its own, with identity, discovery, reachability, an explicit exposure policy, and an understanding of both deployment modes — overlay on top of existing IP, and ground-up where the mesh is the network.
There are also two side trips you can take:
-
ipv6-adapter-walkthrough.md — trace one
sshfrom DNS query through session setup to the far-side TUN, usingfipstopandfipsctlto watch each step. Optional, but if you like seeing how the pieces fit together, this is the doc that shows you. Take it any time after tutorial 1. -
native-api-walkthrough.md — write a program against the experimental native datagram API, addressing a peer by public key and port with no IPv6 emulation and no TUN. Runs two throwaway nodes on one machine, so it needs no mesh and no root, and you can take it without doing the tutorials first.
Advanced
These are not part of the new-user progression. They assume you have already worked through the tutorials above and now want to fold FIPS into a wider network deployment.
- deploy-fips-gateway.md — Stand up a
fips-gatewayon an OpenWrt access point so unmodified LAN hosts can reach<npub>.fipsdestinations through a DNS- allocated virtual IPv6 pool and kernel nftables NAT, with no per-host FIPS install. Also walks through one inbound port forward exposing a LAN service to mesh peers. Aimed at operators bridging a LAN segment into the overlay from the edge router. For a non-OpenWrt host the same deployment is in ../how-to/deploy-gateway.md.
When to use the how-to guides instead
The tutorials here walk through one specific path each. The how-to guides under ../how-to/ are the operator recipes — alternative provisioning paths, less-common configurations, troubleshooting techniques. Once you have the shape of FIPS in your head from these tutorials, the how-tos are where you'll go to look up "how do I do X?" without being walked through the surrounding context.