● Field Manual — Edition 1
Building a distributed, anonymous, encrypted, censorship-resistant people's internet — simulated in a Proxmox homelab, deployable in the real world.
Yggdrasil batman-adv Matrix / Element Nostr Asterisk WireGuard VPN I2P Hyphanet IPFS XMPP / Prosody
📡 Fiber · SDR · WiFi · LoRa · Meshtastic 🖥️ Proxmox VE homelab 🔒 Zero Trust by design
── by The Techno Anarchist ──
Preface
The political and technical case for a people's internet.
Every authoritarian playbook includes the same move: control the communications infrastructure. Kill the cell towers, throttle the ISPs, block the DNS resolvers, log the packet flows, arrest the administrators. History rhymes — from the Soviet jamming of BBC broadcasts to the Myanmar military cutting internet during the 2021 coup, from the Iranian internet blackouts during protests to the Chinese Golden Shield filtering every packet leaving the country.
The answer is not to ask governments for permission to communicate. The answer is to build infrastructure that inherently resists centralized control — networks that route around damage, encrypt by default, require no central registry, and can be deployed with commodity hardware and open-source software by ordinary people.
This is a technical handbook for doing exactly that. We begin in a Proxmox homelab — a safe sandboxed environment where you can spin up a dozen virtual machines and simulate an entire mesh city — and we provide every configuration file, command, and explanation you need. The same configs run in the real world.
⚠️ Legal notice The technologies described in this book are legal open-source software. Operating amateur radio, LoRa transmitters, or unlicensed spectrum devices may require a license in your jurisdiction. Running anonymous networks may be restricted in certain countries. Know your local laws. This book is for educational and defensive purposes only.
By the end of this book you will have designed and configured a fully functional parallel internet stack covering every OSI layer:
| Layer | Technology | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Physical | Fiber, WiFi 802.11s, LoRa, SDR | Carry bits without telcos |
| Mesh routing | batman-adv, Yggdrasil | Self-healing IP fabric |
| Overlay / anonymity | WireGuard, I2P, Hyphanet | Encrypt and anonymize all traffic |
| Storage & content | IPFS | Censorship-resistant file distribution |
| Messaging | Matrix, XMPP, Nostr | Federated / decentralised chat |
| Voice & video | Asterisk (SIP/WebRTC) | Peer-to-peer calls |
Chapter 0
Building the virtual proving ground before deploying in the real world.