ArjenandJohnathan Corgan
40b24cc9df
The mesh0/mesh1 and ap0/ap1 Ethernet transports shipped commented out, and fips-mesh-setup / fips-ap-setup awk-toggled the comment prefix in fips.yaml when they created or removed an interface. That existed for one reason: a transport whose interface was missing at startup was skipped and never retried, so a stock install that never ran the helpers would have logged a bind warning every boot. The daemon now waits for the interface and binds it when it appears, so the toggling has nothing left to protect. The blocks ship enabled with optional: true — which is the honest statement about a radio the router may never configure — and the helpers create the interface and stop there. No config rewrite, and no "restart fips AFTER the interface is up" step anywhere in either procedure. phy0-sta0 (wwan) gets optional: true for the same reason: it only exists while a radio is in station mode. eth0 and br-lan stay required, and the test pins that they do — marking the whole ethernet block optional would silence exactly the failures this policy exists to surface. With presence on IFF_UP rather than IFF_UP|IFF_RUNNING, that stays correct for a router with nothing plugged into its LAN ports: absence now means the netdev is gone or admin-down, a real fault, rather than an empty switch port. fips-ap-setup still edits node.rendezvous.lan, and that one does still need a restart: it is a config value, not an interface. The changelog entry gains an upgrade note. fips.yaml is a package conffile, so a router whose setup script had already uncommented a block keeps that block untouched and never receives the new key; with optional defaulting to false the block is required, and an absent interface there stays Degraded and errors once at ten seconds where the shipped file is silent.
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.