Maybe the next post will say "Blog is hosted on a Nintendo Wii (running Varnish)"
https://blog.infected.systems/status/ for a plaintext status of what the Wii's doing load-wise (if it's still up, updated every ~15 minutes according to the blog).
You're not going to win an points with the family when they can't stream Disney+ because you had to expose a webserver running on that old Wii to the internet, using your home internet connection.
Please use OBS
The Wii is probably the first Nintendo console where all the hardware you need to do this is fully built in (though maybe the Nintendo DS, depending how much you're willing to try to get Linux + your server to fit in memory without plugging in a RAM expansion pack to the GBA slot).
Even though accessories were required, you could probably do this with both the N64 Disk Drive or GameCube network adapter. Both were network interfaces that still dispatched to the underlying system.
The N64 Disk Drive [1] would be a fun case, because the storage medium is a glorified floppy disk drive. It does connect over a modem, so there'd be some fun middleware.
The Super Nintendo had a network adapter as well, and both the NES and SNES [2] had satellite networking adapters in Japan. IIRC, there was also a network adapter for the Game Boy. I'm not sure how or if those would work, or how much control was surrendered to the hardware/software of the network adapter itself to let it do all the driving.
I'm almost certain I remember a similar effort for the Game Boy Pocket, though it might not have entered the market.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Computer_Network_System
Unfortunately, I can't find an accessible link from where I am right now. Maybe when I get back home...
- http://www.atarihq.com/museum/2678/graduate.html
- https://atarimuseum.ctrl-alt-rees.com/videogames/consoles/26...
Can it run Linux? Ehhh....... can it run a web server? Absolutely.
* we don't talk about using the 0.6MB VRAM for purposes other than video (even though it should work fine).
The EZ-Flash V 3-in-1 actually added a whopping +16 MB (128 Mb) of PSRAM! Growing up I only ever had the +8 MB pack from Opera... what a weird bit of history that browser port was :).
I doubt you can go much further back than Fifth Gen (of consoles) or so
An Atari 2600 might be a bridge too far, but a NES should be able to do it.
5th generation could probably make it happen, but without ethernet, you're looking at a modem or serial interface, and in today's world that's almost certainly talking to something else in your house that's a better host. :P Wikipedia categorizes the Apple Pippin as 5th gen, and it's more or less a Mac with a weird pinout for the PCI slot, so I'd guess it's the easiest to get ethernet with; without resorting to something that has more smarts than the 'host'
you can run a C64 OS on the NES because of the shared CPU features, with limitations: https://github.com/calcwatch/nes64
which means you can port C64 LUnix NG to NES by adding the Famicom Disk System, which adds more RAM: https://hackaday.com/2024/02/11/running-unix-on-a-nintendo-e...
LUnix NG comes with an experimental web server: https://github.com/ytmytm/c64-lng/blob/b76b0470e28ec20d08c37..., https://github.com/ytmytm/c64-lng/blob/b76b0470e28ec20d08c37...
So in theory you could serve HTTP 1.0 from a NES. ("to whom" would be the big next question)
Nice work.
This actually reminds me of two very interesting bugs which used together basically make it so that you can play WFC games (basically just Mario Kart Wii, nowadays) as simple as changing the DNS settings on your Wii
1. Firstly, as long as you set a particular field in the certificate, it just is completely happy with an invalid cert. (This was fixed by the NWC library by the time it was released In Korea, notably, although this bug was present in DWC for a long while.
(Aside:
I actually suspect that this bug was present in the RVL SDK (used by games and such on the PPC), but also is caused by the same cause as the signing/Trucha bug[1]. While the latter is a IOS specific exploit, it wouldn't surprise me if the same code was used in both this and DWC (the networking library). Given that Mario Kart Wii has an associated IOS version of IOS36[2], but DWC code isn't part of IOS, my hunch is that they used either the same or similar validation logic OR both bugs were squashed a part of some security related cleanup.
I haven't actually gone through the reverse engineering effort to confirm this yet, but given that this doesn't work on the Korean version of MKW, which notably uses a later version of IOS and other libraries, my hunch is that those bugs are one in the same. The fix timing at least seems interesting to me. Anyway side note over.)
2. The networking library also has an RCE caused by a buffer overrun, basically from the first message it has a length that's unchecked and the DWC library blindly memcpys data from the packet. This is kinda why it's important to have some sort of patchset that fixes these bugs (because the operating system and libraries ship with the game and you can't update those except for in memory).
The culmination of this is all you have to do is
1. Change your DNS settings on your unmodified Wii to point to a specified DNS server.
2. Start Mario Kart Wii (probably, although some other games work too), open up WFC
So that the game...
3. Does a DNS lookup for the WFC server which intentionally links to a 3rd party server
4. Passes validation of a bad cert which intentionally sets one of the fields to a null value in order to make the Wii accept it
5. Receives a message that contains an exploit which patches the game in memory to fix the known RCEs and setup URLs to resolve to different domains instead of using the old WFC ones among other things (such as cheat reporting that is all client-side based, etc)
all so you can play Wii games (probably Mario Kart Wii) online 11 years after WFC shut down for good :)
By networking, I am assuming you mean console stack... which I had experience with myself, and yeah... not great. But even more, their web services (more than 10 years ago at this point, hopefully better now) were so, so bad.
The thing that struck me then, and continues to seem true, is how much they just don't really seem to care and that they singularly focus at being good at innovating where it matters: games and differentiated hardware.
Young me thought they were silly for being so "behind the times". Older me respects it more.
https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/... (Point 4 under "On a PC or smart device")
This can be mitigated by installing Priiloader, and having it autoboot into either the Homebrew Channel or the NetBSD .dol file
> So I put together a simple shell script that runs from the crontab every 15 min, outputting some system stats to a basic HTML file in the webroot.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/new-docs-show-ns...
And CloudFlare!
So I put together a simple shell script that runs from the crontab every 15 min, outputting some system stats to a basic HTML file in the webroot.
Given that this is the case, ntpd using 15% of the system memory means it was using about 13 MB of RAM - hardly a huge chunk by today's standards but not small either. I wonder if reducing the number of time servers would improve this much? On my system I can see I'm tracking about 9 servers from the debian pool.
Compare this to the XBox 360 which even at the time had 512 MB, it's really amazing how much they managed to squeeze out of such a tiny chip.
rubatuga•6h ago