AlexDid you leave your Wii at the #EMF2024 Swap Shop?
If so, it's now hosting my blog:
https://blog.infected.systems/posts/2025-04-21-this-blog-is-hosted-on-a-nintendo-wii/
Huge credit to @jmcwhatever for the effort porting NetBSD to the Wii!
It's surviving remarkably well so far, but you can really see the impact of having that NTP sync fire at :42.
12+ hours in and this is still getting boosts and likes so I thought I'd follow up with some of the graphs from the past 12h.
The Wii has handled this far better than I expected, honestly.
We've settled in to an average rate of approx 10 requests-per-second, down from a peak of 40. Almost all responses are taking less than 0.1 seconds now, though the heatmap suggests it was struggling a bit more when we were up at 40 per-second.
Miyuru Sankalpa@alexhaydock survived HN hug of death 🎉
Book@alexhaydock I love that you did this.
ipod-nano._http._tcp.local.@alexhaydock why would it struggle with ntp syncing so bad? i wouldnt have guessed it was an intensive operation
Zach Leatherman@alexhaydock @jmcwhatever ahah amazing
computer mausRebooting NetBSD reboots the whole console, and not just the NetBSD ‘app’, so you’ll find yourself back at the Wii Menu after any kernel patch or system upgrade. Yes, this does mean that the Wiimote and sensor bar in your server cupboard are now a vital component of the production infrastructure.
this is true genius!
TamontenProps.
Exactly the wonderfully dumb nerd stuff I’d expect and love from EMF attendees.
Jared McNeill@alexhaydock from your blog: "Rebooting NetBSD reboots the whole console" you can directly boot NetBSD with bootmii (on older models) or priiloader (the others). The bootmii method actually frees up over 10MB of RAM, so I'd recommend that if your system can do it.
shom
🔺GnomeBones🔺@alexhaydock @jmcwhatever I hope you gave it a wash.
@charleshb.bsky.social
David Cantrell 🏏@alexhaydock @jmcwhatever I'm not sure which is worse, someone abandoning a Wii, or someone abandoning radioactive sources
Greg@alexhaydock @jmcwhatever That's a new (to me) Wii exploit! One I like a lot is "str2hax" that doesn't require anything but an Internet connection - you set the Wii to use a (bogus) DNS server, it redirects the Wii to a hosted webserver that serves a malformed buffer-overflowing string to the Wii where it'd display some EULA terms and conditions, and then it goes about installing HBC and other goodies
sb arms & legs@sb greetings from NB :)
@jmcwhatever
Hey from SJ!
Hey from SJ!
⛧⛧⛧J.d.B.⛧⛧⛧@alexhaydock @jmcwhatever just read about this on Lobsters. Installing a modern OS to weird hardware never gets old.
🍪 ~EDOX~ 🍪@alexhaydock @jmcwhatever Very cool. I have an extra Wii sitting around so gonna bookmark this for later. Love finding cool stuff like this.
Derek Caelin is writing a book
Anthony Sorace@alexhaydock @jmcwhatever @me_ Nice. For like two years, these kept showing up one or two at a time at the local goodwill, in a weirdly steady stream. That stream dried up about a year before the NetBSD port was announced. Sure wish I’d picked one (or a few) up.
Michael Horne@alexhaydock @jmcwhatever The whimsy on display here is real :-D. Fab write up! Silly experiment, but hey, it works! Nice one!
Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ@alexhaydock @jmcwhatever As I am thinking of shifting my blog to an entirely static site, I find this notion to be oddly alluring.
Cursed Silicon@alexhaydock @jmcwhatever Small correction to that delightful blog post. You *can* run current NetBSD on the Dreamcast, too!
And (in theory) the Linux kernel still has "dreamcast_defconfig" defined. Though I'm unclear if the bootloader (A fork of RedBoot from the 90's) can handle newer, larger kernels
The Secretbatcave
nikomoWow, electricity pricing in the UK is highway robbery. For that price, you can almost get an ARM instance from Netcup, and you'll get 6 vcores with 8GB RAM.
Remiberry@alexhaydock @jmcwhatever I think you can load up a binary for automatic booting in Priiloader so you don't have to worry about your sensor bar, etc. :)
Billy@retr0.id new target for milipds? PDS on a Wii is an interesting concept for the shitpost
David Buchanan (@retr0.id)
reverse engineering, cryptography, exploits, hardware, file formats, and generally giving computers a hard time Fedi: @[email protected] Macroblog: https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/
SkotchY@alexhaydock @jmcwhatever so the .onion service (or tor service, idk what it is called) does not run on the wii directly, right? But on the caddy thing? #onion #tor #selfhosting #selfhosted
👾 HeyIts8-BitRobin 👾@alexhaydock okay I’ve definitely missed the point here but I was reading the alt text and just wanted to say that’s almost certainly a Chinese money plant, or a Pilea peperomioides! Literally doesn’t matter but I couldn’t help myself, sorry :P 💖
Goz 🕹@alexhaydock Just thought I'd mention that you can use VLC to view your video capture device on the Mac, although I do admire working right to left 🤣
⊥ᵒᵚ Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️@alexhaydock @jmcwhatever nice. Don't I remember the Wii having WiFi though? If it does, did you try it?
@falken @alexhaydock it has wifi, and it works on NetBSD provided you install the necessary firmware files
bemyak@alexhaydock The most important question though: did you get a lawsuit from Nintendo already?
Pietervdvn 
@alexhaydock You found it in the EMF swap? Make sure it ain't radioactive then...
Kiyo@alexhaydock ooo very nice! i did something similar but with a wii u running debian instead, blog post is making me consider writing what i've done with it thus far
vriska, thief of light 
@alexhaydock "The Wii doesn’t support SDXC or newer cards, which means we’re limited to 32GB." this isn't true, fwiw, but older versions of nintendo (and homebrew?) SDKs don't support SDHC cards. i'm not actually sure on official SDK support for SDXC, but all modern homebrew supports it afaik
Thomas SchäferYour DNS says you have IPv6, but it doesn't work.