Johnathan Corgan
f0ee81ec7c
Move the staged changelog entries under a 0.5.1 heading dated 2026-09-06, and add an entry for the deb-install hang: the suite started a oneshot unit that requires the daemon, so a daemon that could not execute left the start job undispatched and the suite reported nothing at all. That is the whole class of fault the suite exists to find, and it protects the run that gates artifact publication, so it is owed an entry. Add the release notes and mirror them to the root file. The notes lead with who should upgrade and who is unaffected, because for most users this release changes nothing and for Debian 12 and Ubuntu 22.04 users the daemon has never run at all. They state what was measured and what was not, and give an objdump line that reads the floor of a binary already installed: 2.34 from this release, 2.39 from any earlier one. The root mirror is not byte-identical to the versioned copy and cannot be. The two files sit at different depths, so a link that resolves in one breaks in the other; the mirror is content-identical with the relative link paths rewritten, and the check is a diff whose every hunk is a link path. Here that is two hunks, both confirmed to resolve. The currency audit found five stale version sites and two claims that do not match the tree, all corrected here. The status badge, the release-notes link and the status sentence in the README follow the release, as they did at v0.4.2. The FreeBSD install line gave a filename that does not exist, since the tree is 0.5.1-dev; it now takes a version placeholder so it stops going stale at every bump, and the example above it keeps a concrete name. The design document recorded the first lookup fix and not the second: it still said a returning copy is dropped as a duplicate, which the next commit in this release exists to stop doing. It now names the counter that actually receives the drop. The README claimed the .deb is exercised per release. The install suite is real and covers the five distributions it names, but it runs on push and pull request, not at a tag, and no workflow installs the published artifact. The sentence now says that, so the released package being checked by hand is written down rather than assumed. Getting-started gains the statement this release should have produced: which distributions are supported and why the binaries run on all of them. Until now the policy and the floor lived only in the build environment file, so an operator had nowhere to read either.
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.