fr34akyandJohnathan Corgan
429d77731b
pfSense is FreeBSD underneath, but the FreeBSD package does not work there, failing in three silent ways. pfSense runs only /usr/local/etc/rc.d/*.sh at boot and re-runs them when WAN gets a new address, so a suffixless rc script never starts; unbound.conf is generated from config.xml with no conf.d, so a drop-in is never read; and on a firewall where the default-on "Allow IPv6" has been turned off, unbound is then generated with do-ip6: no and a responder on ::1 is unreachable. So this ships fips.sh, wires the fips. zone into the DNS Resolver through config.xml, and binds the responder on 127.0.0.1 for robustness against that last case. The rc script is plain sh: what pfSense imposes is the .sh name and that a re-run leave a running daemon alone and exit 0. It identifies the daemon by process name and recovers an orphaned daemon(8) supervisor found via fstat, since a locked empty pidfile makes daemon(8) report pid -1. The DNS setup is a manual step, never run from post-install, and validates the merged options with unbound-checkconf (pfSense's test_unbound_config) before touching config.xml, so a bad merge cannot take DNS from every client behind the firewall. The daemon runs under daemon(8) -H so newsyslog can rotate its log by signalling a reopen. Packages link statically by default: pfSense runs a FreeBSD base that cannot be obtained to link against. A firmware upgrade keeps the package (pfSense-upgrade removes only pfSense-pkg-*; confirmed on a live Plus 26.03.1 -> 26.07 upgrade, aarch64 — the package survived and the daemon restarted at boot. That is a minor, FreeBSD 16 -> 16 change; the cross-major compat case is still only source-reasoned). aarch64 is refused, where a static binary faults at posix_spawn. The mechanics the two builders share — version derivation, the stage layout, the manifest fields, the @sample scripts and pkg create — live in packaging/common/pkg-lib.sh, which both source; the FreeBSD package is byte-identical before and after that extraction. One ABI can serve more than one product: CE 2.9 and Plus 26.x on Intel are both FreeBSD:16:amd64 with a byte-identical artifact, named ...-ce2.9-plus26-amd64.pkg. The pfSense package is built and checked in its own CI job — separate from the FreeBSD package, and not a dependency of the release job, so a pfSense-only failure reds that job alone and is never a release asset. It is kept as a workflow artifact until it has been installed on a real pfSense box. CI produces the CE 2.8.1 (FreeBSD:15:amd64) package; CE 2.9, Plus 26.x Intel and ARM need a FreeBSD 16 build host the CI does not have, and ARM stays build-it-yourself because rustup ships no toolchain for it. testing/check-pfsense-pkg.sh validates a built package on any FreeBSD host and runs in that CI job: contents, modes, a positive boot-script lifecycle against a stub daemon, php -l and a fips_strip_block unit test of the config.xml helper. Installing on a real pfSense box, and the firmware-upgrade behaviour, are covered only by an aarch64 hardware run and pfSense-upgrade's source; the README records what is and is not tested. Co-authored-by: Johnathan Corgan <johnathan@corganlabs.com>
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.