[ ~martin | sisela ]

"The drone drifted through the darkness of interstellar space. It really was alone. Profoundly, even frighteningly alone. It picked through the debris that had been its power, sensory and weapon systems, appalled at the wasteland it was discovering within itself. The drone felt weird. It knew who it was - it was Sisela Ytheleus 1/2, a type D4 military drone of the Explorer Ship Peace Makes Plenty, a vessel of the Stargazer Clan, part of the Fifth Fleet of the Zetetic Elench - but its real-time memories only began from the instant it had woken up here..."

-- Excession, Iain M. Banks

Introduction

Sisela is a small, self-contained system designed to wake up in any PC and turn it into a highly capable piece of networking equipment. It can act as a bridge, router, firewall, DHCP server, DNS server, wireless access point or any combination of these functions.

It can boot and run from a single floppy disk, or a CD-ROM. It is based on Linux and supports a wide variety of network and wireless hardware, including ISA, PCI, PCMCIA, CardBus and USB devices. With the exception of some ISA cards, all these should be detected and identified automatically.

The current version requires manual configuration through a command line interface. A more user friendly system is in development for the next version, which will allow web administration and extended facilities for automatic setup.

Support for other boot methods, such as USB storage devices and PXE network booting, is also planned.

Download

Floppy disk version

The floppy version uses an extended format to fit more data (1.68MB) onto a standard 3.5" floppy disk. To use this file you must format a disk in this format, then write the contents of the file to it.

On Windows, a program such as WinImage can be used to format 1.68MB disks and write floppy images.

CD-ROM version

This is a normal CD-ROM image and can be written to a CD using your usual CD writing software.

Source Code

To build from source, unpack this package on a Linux system and type 'make' in the resulting directory. The build script will attempt to download the other required source packages and build Sisela. Note that this requires around 300MB to complete.

Older versions

License

Sisela is mostly based on existing software (see below). Where not otherwise indicated, it is copyright ©2002-2004 Martin Ling, and released under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2, as published by the Free Software Foundation.

Details

Sisela uses a 2.4 series Linux kernel, booting from a FAT-formatted floppy using the SYSLINUX bootloader. Userspace binaries are dynamically linked against the uClibc library. Other packages used are:

Contact

There is a mailing list for reporting bugs, suggesting improvements, and raising queries. In general you should post here if you need a reply, because this saves me work if the same question is asked again. Due to spam problems this list is currently moderated, so your message may not appear immediately.

Also please note that Sisela functions basically like any other Linux system with regard to setting up networking, routing and firewalling. Consult general Linux documentation or ask some friendly Linux users about your problem first. I'd rather keep to dealing with Sisela itself.

If you're just sending positive feedback, please direct it to Martin Ling - thanks for those received already :-) .