Blog hosted on a Nintendo Wii

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

A hobbyist has moved their personal blog onto a Nintendo Wii running NetBSD, prompting admiration for the feat and curiosity about its real-world performance and reliability under Hacker News traffic. Commenters dive into the Wii’s constrained hardware, Nintendo’s historically weak networking stacks, and the tricks used to expose more of the system for general-purpose OSes, noting how little RAM and bandwidth are actually needed for a simple web server. The thread branches into whether even older consoles like the NES, SNES, or Game Boy could serve web pages with enough clever hardware add-ons, highlighting both the technical limits and the appeal of stretching retro hardware far beyond its original intent.

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.