How to turn your Nintendo Wii into a server to host your blog
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Alex Haydock, an engineer working for a British energy company, revealed that he hosts his blog on the Nintendo Wii , a home video game console released in 2006. He also explains the steps to host a blog on the Wii.
This blog is hosted on a Nintendo Wii
https://blog.infected.systems/posts/2025-04-21-this-blog-is-hosted-on-a-nintendo-wii/
In fact, if you visit the blog post above, you'll see the message, 'If you're reading this message, the following experiment is still in progress. This page is powered by a real Wii.'
Also, when I accessed
Haydock's hobby is 'running general-purpose operating systems on equipment that is not for general use,' and in the past he has run
NetBSD , a free UNIX-based OS, is characterized by the fact that it can run on a variety of computers, not just PC/AT compatible machines. On the official website , the name 'Wii' is written as an example of a PowerPC-equipped machine on which NetBSD can run. Since the stable version of this NetBSD, version 10.1, was released in December 2024, Haydock thought that it might be possible to actually build a production environment on the Wii.
To put his plan into action, Haydock got a used Wii at a charity second-hand sales event. The CPU installed in the Wii is the PowerPC G3 series 'Broadway', which was also installed in the first iMac released by Apple in 1998, and its computing performance is quite limited compared to its equivalent, the PowerPC 750CL. However, Haydock commented, 'The same PowerPC G3 series RAD750 is also installed in the James Webb Space Telescope , so it should be able to host a static website.'
To install NetBSD on the Wii, you must first modify the Wii. There used to be a way to exploit a buffer overflow using save data from ' The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess,' but now an exploit called 'Wilbrand' is more common. Wilbrand executes unsigned code by exploiting a vulnerability that allows messages to be saved and retrieved from the SD card in the Wii Message Board , a function of the Wii. Using this exploit, we will prepare to install the unofficial Wii channel 'HomebrewChannel' that can run homebrew tools.
Next, prepare an SDHC card with a NetBSD image written on it and boot it from the Homebrew Channel.
Once NetBSD is up and running, you need to configure SSH to administer the system remotely. The SSH daemon is running by default, so all you need to do is set a password for the root user and add 'PermitRootLogin yes' to sshd_config.
After installation, edit /etc/ifconfig.axe0 to set up a static network configuration and reboot the host. Then install the NetBSD package manager 'pkgin' and install the lightweight web server 'lighttpd' suitable for resource-constrained environments, then enable and start it. Haydock's blog itself consists of static pages, so all you need to do is transfer the files with rsync to host the blog over standard HTTP.
According to Haydock, TLS encryption processing was a heavy burden on the Wii's performance, so Caddy was placed in front as a reverse proxy to offload the encryption processing of TLS termination. However, caching was disabled so that the Wii handled all requests directly. In addition, to monitor the system status, a simple shell script was set in crontab to output basic system statistics in HTML format every 15 minutes.
In order to optimize system resources, unnecessary services are disabled. In particular, ntpd was taking up 15% of memory usage, so I disabled it once, but the clock started to get out of sync, perhaps because the game console was old or there was a problem with NetBSD, so I set ntpd to run only once every hour at 42 minutes past the hour.
'I feel that this challenge went much better and easier than I expected, but there are some drawbacks. Restarting NetBSD restarts not only NetBSD but also the Wii, so after kernel patches and system upgrades, you are returned to the Wii menu. Therefore, the Wii remote and sensor bar are important components of the production infrastructure,' said Haydock. As for power consumption, it is about 18W at idle and 13.2kWh per month, which is cheaper to maintain than the virtual private servers offered by major cloud providers even in the UK, where electricity is expensive.
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