[Gllug] Sisela - floppy distribution for routing/wireless/etc

[Martin Ling]

Hello, anyone who remembers me :-)

I'm back (from Edinburgh) in London for a while and thought I'd drop a
line to the list about something I've been working on:

http://the.earth.li/~martin/sisela/

It's "yet another floppy distro", but I think it's a potentially very
useful one. It's designed for setting up old/spare machines as routers,
DHCP servers, wireless APs, firewalls, etc.

It supports every PCI/ISA/PCMCIA/CardBus network device known to Linux
2.4.22, including wireless cards, and should detect all but some non
Plug-and-Play ISA types automatically. A lot of people have also thus
found it useful just for hardware support testing.

There's a DHCP client and server, DNS caching server, iptables with
filtering and NAT support, and the latest version also includes an SSH2
server for remote administration (there's a reasonably complete basic
shell environment, including various network debugging tools and an
editor with vi/emacs/pico/nedit/wordstar emulation; I'm taking no
sides... :-) )

This is all on a single floppy in the standard 1.44MB format. It will
boot on a 386 with 6MB of RAM. Furthermore there's currently still 140k
uncompressed space free on my development version which I plan to use to
add IPsec support, and a RIP/BGP/OSPF daemon to help in routing on
larger community networks.

At the moment I'd really appreciate test results, so I encourage you to
download the image (there's an El Torrito bootable CDROM version also)
and let me know how you get on - even just whether it succesfully
detects your network devices would be very useful.

I've learnt a lot developing this, which I could probably convey in a
short (10-15 mins) talk at the next meeting, if people are interested.


Martin

-- 
http://the.earth.li/~martin/

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