mirror of
https://github.com/jmcorgan/fips.git
synced 2026-09-14 00:45:08 +00:00
Johnathan Corgan
6a564e26ac
Everything the release needs except the version number, which stays at 0.5.0-dev until the tag. The changelog entry covers only the work that is new on this line. The point release's forty-six entries arrived under their own heading with the forward merge and are left alone; the twenty that remained are regrouped by topic and eight more added for changes no entry covered. Three of those eight matter to someone upgrading. Five root modules and four re-exports left the public library surface and Node::connections narrowed, none of it recorded anywhere; the entry names what to use instead and distinguishes the removed connection-phase enum from the Noise type of the same name, which is a different type that still exists. Tracing targets moved, so an existing RUST_LOG filter stops matching rather than erroring. And the handshake resend interval key no longer governs the first resend, which is now a constant, though it still governs later ones. Seven more entries cover the work that landed after the first content pass was written: the experimental native datagram API, the fipsctl probe diagnostic, per-instance transport addressing, the app-owned UDP socket seam, and the connect, disconnect and path-MTU fixes. The four bug fixes among them all reach the deployed line, so the release notes no longer claim this release carries exactly one fix for a shipped bug; it carries four. There is no security section, because after the split every security entry belongs to the point release. The release notes say so plainly rather than leaving a reader upgrading across both releases to conclude this one carries no security work. The notes are organized by audience, since the release spans OpenWrt routers, embedders, FreeBSD, and the existing platforms, and a single list serves none of them. The native datagram API is given a section of its own rather than folded into the embedding seam: it is a client-facing API rather than a way to host a node, and its one rule with no Berkeley-socket counterpart, that the v1 wire carries no half-close, needs to be somewhere a client author will read it. FreeBSD is advertised as supported on x86_64 only, stated wherever the platform appears. Android is advertised as an embedding seam and not as a supported platform: a compile-gated library surface with no artifact and no host application guide. The configuration table rename is carried through every shipped file that taught the old spelling: nine documentation files, the OpenWrt sample config and a test generator, twenty-two sites in all. Guides written this same cycle were among them, which is how the omission was found. The documentation that arrived with the native API was checked for the same omission and was already clean. The compatibility tests keep the old spelling deliberately, since they exist to test the fold. The changelog section is the fold of master's [Unreleased], not a snapshot of it. An earlier version of this commit took a copy that then drifted, so each section ended up holding a bullet the other did not and re-folding them would have picked a winner silently. Both causes were fixed on master instead — the NixOS module had never been recorded there, and the pre-release batch of fixes was new — so [Unreleased] is a strict superset and this is a copy rather than a merge. [0.5.0] carries all forty-six bullets byte for byte, [Unreleased] is empty, and [0.4.2] is untouched, checked by hashing it against master's copy. The BLE work landed after the content pass and gets one summary entry in the changelog and one section in the release notes rather than nine bullets: the ble_available gate replacing target_os = "linux", packet-boundary recovery for stream-oriented backends, peer recognition by node identity instead of a rotating link address, the L2CAP PSM moving into the backend seam and onto the advertisement, the embedder-supplied Android radio, bounded probe retry, and inbound handshakes moved off the accept loop. The two release-notes copies no longer share their link paths. Relative links resolve from one directory only, so the seven written for docs/releases/ all 404ed from the root copy. The root copy now uses paths from the repository root and the versioned copy keeps the ../ form; both sets were resolved against the tree. The same two links are broken the same way in the v0.4.0 through v0.4.2 notes, left as shipped history. The contributor tallies are re-derived against maint..HEAD rather than adjusted: twenty commits from outside the project and 171 from me, with Arjen at fifteen and fr34aky at two. An earlier count of twelve and 138 was carried from a measurement taken three days before this content was written, and the BLE branch widened the gap after it. Arjen's NixOS flake module, the UDP sin6_scope_id fix and most of the BLE rework were uncredited, as was fr34aky's L2CAP PSM seam. They want one last re-derive at tag time if anything lands before the tag. A sweep of all 99 tracked markdown files against the tree corrected fifty-three of them. Four told the reader to run a build.sh that does not exist; the only harness builder is testing/scripts/build.sh. The BLE build prerequisites were described as optional on the strength of a probe that build.rs does not perform, and bluez was named a build prerequisite when libdbus-sys asks only for libdbus-1-dev and pkg-config and bluez is the runtime daemon. Link cost is the primary sort key in next-hop ranking, not reserved for future use; Ethernet runs on macOS as well as Linux; the BLE MTU is the L2CAP CoC MTU rather than a negotiated ATT_MTU; effective Ethernet MTU is 1497; the LAN discovery subsystem is src/mdns and eight citations still named a src/discovery that never existed here. The connectivity states in three tutorials were invented, and their jq filters matched nothing including healthy peers. One command filtered on a literal fd97: address prefix, which only the first byte of fixes, so it returned empty for all but one reader in 256 and every later step using the variable failed silently. transports.tor.advertise_on_nostr was undocumented despite being validated against node.rendezvous.nostr.enabled. The transport design document gains the BLE section it never had, written from the source: the backend cascade and its compile_error tripwire, the platform gate, the PSM advertisement wire layout and the byte budget that forces a 16-bit service-data key, and the probe and admission bounds. Three source files carried the same class of staleness and are corrected with the documentation: the OpenWrt ipk usage line and Makefile error text both named a packaging/openwrt that does not exist, and chaos.sh parsed --subnet without listing it. Folded in with the content commit, having been prepared alongside it: The three GitHub Action pins that had gone stale. Every third-party action is pinned to a commit SHA, nothing reports that a pin has aged, and re-resolving all ten against their tags found dorny/test-reporter@v2, taiki-e/install-action@v2 and vmactions/freebsd-vm@v1 had moved. The three install-action@nextest references stay unpinned, since that action reads the tool to install from the ref name. check-action-pins.sh passes at 75 references and all nine workflow files parse. The lockfile refresh, which is the mutating half of the dependency sweep. Thirty-six packages move to their latest semver-compatible versions and every one is transitive; nothing declared in Cargo.toml changes version. No advisory forces any of them. It was taken before the validation battery, because a gate run against a lockfile that later moves proves nothing about what ships. The sha2 0.10 to 0.11, hkdf 0.12 to 0.13 and bech32 0.11 to 0.12 majors, three of the four deferred at v0.4.0 for change surface rather than security. All three land with no source change. sha2 and hkdf must move together, since both depend on digest 0.11, and neither changes an algorithm. That matters because the chaining-key KDF in the Noise handshake is built on Hkdf::<Sha256>, where an output change would be a wire break rather than a compile error; no known-answer vectors exist for that path, so the wire-compatibility gate is what covers it. secp256k1 0.31 is deliberately absent, since nostr's own requirement would leave two copies of the ECC library in the tree. The README support matrix, rebuilt as one feature table broken out by Linux variety. A single Linux column hid that Debian, Ubuntu, Arch and NixOS are one glibc build differing in packaging, that OpenWrt is musl and drops BLE, and that Android is not a daemon platform. Transport rows sort by how many platforms carry them. A Native API row reads its platform set from the cfg gates. The installer row becomes a package format row naming the artifact, and only the .deb is exercised per release. Four changelog and release-note gaps the BLE re-walk found: a Bluetooth LE bullet stranded inside the released 0.4.2 section, a missing Fixed entry for the scan and probe loop counting a pool-refused connection as an established link, the unnamed embedder call that installs an application-owned radio, and the fact that stopping the transport now stops scanning as well as advertising. Three release-document gaps found walking the unsurveyed commits: the UDP reuse-flag fix stated in the direction opposite to the one it was made, with the silent second-daemon bind it prevents left unsaid; the corrected native-API socket paragraph carried into both release-note copies, which still named SOCK_SEQPACKET on FreeBSD and two kernels where three are handled; and the coordinate-cache hardening, which shipped with no text anywhere despite adding four operator-visible status fields. That last entry states plainly that the checks are mitigations and not a closure, since the coordinate is still not authenticated. Also folded in, the documentation pass that followed the content commit: A stage-pipeline diagram for the probe, embedded in the fipsctl reference under the five-stage list. It draws the five stages left to right with each stage's failure reasons below it, and the bypass that skips both lookup stages when the coordinates are cached or the target is a direct peer. Its branches come from the probe state machine rather than from the report, so the path stage is drawn as the one failure that does not stop the probe. A rewrite of the README's "What FIPS does" section. It now opens with what a machine running FIPS gets, rather than with the two deployment modes, and gives the self-organizing and permissionless property its own paragraph since it holds for both modes. A regrouping of the README's feature list into the mesh, getting traffic onto it, and running a node, with a bullet added for the native datagram API, which had none despite sitting in the support matrix. The Quick start now leads with the released packages rather than a source build. It also fixes a real defect: the package enables fips.service and fips-dns.service and starts neither on a fresh install, so .fips name resolution was silently dead until the next reboot and neither page said to start the service. A rewrite of the release notes. They opened with seven subsections of upgrade caveats and reached the first feature two hundred lines in; they now open with a summary of the release and elaborate below it in the same order. Android is stated as supported through an embedded crate rather than as a standalone daemon, consistently across all three documents. The OpenWrt pair is corrected: it is 802.11s between routers with FIPS supplying encryption, authentication and routing, plus a convention of an open !FIPS SSID a client joins over WiFi, not meshing over a router's own radios. The probe's path output is described as the least-common-ancestor walk, which is the worst-case fallback route rather than the route a packet takes. Detail that did not change what a reader does was cut from the notes and kept in the changelog.
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.