Two steps in a peer-to-peer connection lean on outside servers by default. Machines behind home or campus routers sometimes cannot connect directly and have to be relayed; and before any connection, a node has to look up where its peers currently are (peer discovery). By default both the relay fallback and the peer-discovery lookup run on servers operated by the transport's upstream project, which are rate-limited and documented by that project as intended for development and testing. This task does not stand up a production relay or discovery service; operating such a service is not part of the plan. It demonstrates, once and reproducibly, that both dependencies can be removed, and exposes the configuration that makes removal a setting rather than a rebuild.
Outcomes
Two steps in a peer-to-peer connection lean on outside servers by default. Machines behind home or campus routers sometimes cannot connect directly and have to be relayed; and before any connection, a node has to look up where its peers currently are (peer discovery). By default both the relay fallback and the peer-discovery lookup run on servers operated by the transport's upstream project, which are rate-limited and documented by that project as intended for development and testing. This task does not stand up a production relay or discovery service; operating such a service is not part of the plan. It demonstrates, once and reproducibly, that both dependencies can be removed, and exposes the configuration that makes removal a setting rather than a rebuild.
Outcomes
services.dspeer-relayNixOS module packaging the open-source relay, and peer discovery configurable to an operator-run service or to the public distributed hash table, with documented direct-only behaviour when no relay is reachable