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fips/docs/reference
Johnathan Corgan f5be8ec07d Meter established-link msg1 separately from stranger admission
The msg1 rate limiter ran before the established-peer carve-out, so a
rekey or restart msg1 arriving on an existing link was refused on
exactly the same terms as a stranger's first packet and the carve-out
below it never applied to the traffic it was written for. On a node
with many peers this refuses a large share of ordinary maintenance
traffic: a field node at roughly 245 peers refused 8753 msg1 in 25
minutes, and 159 of the 201 distinct sources were peers it already
held sessions with.

Classify the source before metering it, and give established-link msg1
its own token bucket instead of a bypass. A bypass was rejected
deliberately: the limiter is global precisely because UDP sources are
spoofable, and an established-peer exemption is by construction keyed
on source address, so metering the exempted class keeps that property
where bypassing discards it.

The bucket is derived from settings the operator already sets, burst
from max_peers and rate from max_peers, the rekey interval and the
resend budget, so raising the peer limit sizes it automatically rather
than leaving a constant nobody revisits. Both parameters can be set
explicitly; an explicit zero burst or non-positive rate is rejected at
config validation, because it would refuse every rekey msg1 from an
established peer rather than disabling the limit.

Split out the established-link test as its own predicate so the
rate-limit classifier and the accept_connections gate cannot drift,
and convert the limiter's pending slot to a guard released on drop.
The slot was previously acquired in one place and released explicitly
at eighteen exit paths; once some paths stop acquiring one, any path
that still released one would have freed a slot belonging to a
different in-flight handshake, lifting effective concurrency above the
configured maximum with no counter moving and no log firing.

The "Msg1 rate limited" line now reports which limb refused, the
pending count or the token bucket, which it did not distinguish
before.

Classification costs an O(peers) scan on every inbound msg1 including
refused ones, where the previous order refused at O(1). The scan is
only needed because addr_to_link is keyed on the unresolved dial
address; correcting that keying reduces this to a single O(1) lookup.
Recorded at the predicate.
2026-07-29 17:10:29 +00:00
..

Reference

Information-oriented technical descriptions for lookup on demand. Reference content describes what is: wire formats, configuration keys, command-line flags, control-socket commands, default values, file paths, exit codes. It is consulted, not read end-to-end.

Reference is austere by design: minimal narrative, no opinions, no guidance on when to use a feature. The "why" lives in design/; the "how do I accomplish X" lives in how-to/.

Available Reference

Document Scope
wire-formats.md All FMP and FSP message byte layouts, encapsulation walkthrough
configuration.md Full YAML configuration reference for the daemon and gateway
security.md nftables baseline, peer ACL, cryptographic primitives, rekey defaults, threat-resistance matrix
nostr-events.md Kind 37195 advert, Kind 21059 traversal signaling, Kind 10050 inbox relays
transports.md Per-transport statistics counter inventory
control-socket.md Line-delimited JSON control protocol for the daemon and gateway
cli-fips.md fips daemon CLI: options, exit codes, environment, files
cli-fipsctl.md fipsctl control-client: subcommands, options, exit codes
cli-fipstop.md fipstop live-status TUI: tabs, keybindings
cli-fips-gateway.md fips-gateway service CLI: options, exit codes, files