Blog hosted on a Nintendo Wii

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Performance and hosting details

  • Commenters note intermittent slowness and “HN hug” effects, but overall performance is considered surprisingly good for Wii hardware.
  • A plaintext status page updated via cron every 15 minutes shows low load averages (~0.06), 88 MB total RAM, and reveals that ntpd takes a notable share of memory.
  • Some argue the site isn’t “fully” Wii-hosted because TLS termination runs on Caddy elsewhere; others suggest dropping TLS or moving Caddy to the Wii for purity.

Wii hardware, NetBSD, and Starlet

  • Discussion confirms NetBSD can access Wii USB 2.0, making SD reliability less critical since a USB thumb drive can be used.
  • Deep dive into the Starlet co-processor and IOS: normally it owns I/O (networking, storage, Bluetooth), but with AHBPROT disabled / MINI-style setups, the main CPU can directly hit the hardware, bypassing Nintendo’s stack.
  • Users contrast this with Nintendo’s original networking design, where limited RAM and a weak TCP stack severely constrained throughput.

Nintendo networking quality and exploits

  • Multiple comments recall Nintendo’s historically poor networking: tiny TCP windows, slow system updates, and bad web services.
  • A detailed anecdote describes how WFC games like Mario Kart Wii can be redirected to community servers via DNS, exploiting a certificate validation bug plus an RCE in the networking library, then patching games in memory.
  • People note Nintendo’s official advice for Switch port-forwarding (opening huge UDP ranges) as emblematic of this attitude.

Could older consoles host websites?

  • Thread branches into whether NES/SNES/5th-gen consoles could host simple HTTP/CGI:
    • One side: RAM and CPU constraints make it extremely hard without heavy cartridge add-ons or “cheating” network chips (with built‑in TCP/IP).
    • Others cite examples (C64 web servers, DS Linux, NES running C64 OS variants, SNES via USB/FXPAK, Game Boy/GBA projects) to argue it’s theoretically feasible with enough external hardware and cleverness.
  • This leads to a philosophical line‑drawing debate: at what point do add-ons mean it’s no longer “really” the console hosting?

Tools, memes, and related projects

  • Several suggest using OBS or QuickTime instead of Photo Booth to avoid flipped video.
  • Priiloader is mentioned as a way to reboot straight into NetBSD after kernel changes.
  • The “SSL Added and removed here!” diagram sparks discussion of NSA leaks and surveillance; mostly as cultural/meme context for the blog’s image.
  • People share similar “silly host” stories, like blogs on robot vacuums or early GBA web servers, and offer Wii colocation for fun.