Blog hosted on a Nintendo Wii
47 comments
·April 21, 2025tech234a
jsheard
That :¬) face makes for a great custom emote in security-related channels.
encom
>SSL Added and removed here!
And CloudFlare!
_fat_santa
It’s so funny so see a top secret label below what’s clearly a hastily scribbled diagram
pyfon
Looks like a design interview round
greeniskool
> Rebooting 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.
This can be mitigated by installing Priiloader, and having it autoboot into either the Homebrew Channel or the NetBSD .dol file
joseda-hg
Based on previous experience with Wii homebrew, you could probably circumvent the (expected) reliability issues of the smaller SD by swapping to a regular USB thumbdrive post exploit, ports are only 2.0 but you're bound by processor anyway
sadeshmukh
FYI - instead of Photo Booth you can use Quicktime Player and "create new movie recording". I believe that should fix the image flipping problem.
RockRobotRock
>I was doing this bit using a capture card and Photo Booth on macOS which doesn’t actually support disabling the image-flip on the video feed
Please use OBS
macshome
I was surprised at the Photo Booth usage as well. I would have just recorded it with the QuickTime Player as if it were an iOS device.
jandrese
Performance is not bad. It's clear they aren't using Nintendo's TCP stack, as it was notoriously terrible on the Wii.
Starlevel004
Nintendo's networking is bad no matter what console somehow
jkrejcha
Yeah also in general the WFC code is a bit dated and not very secure.
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.
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 NWS 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 :)
benwilber0
got hugged.
Maybe the next post will say "Blog is hosted on a Nintendo Wii (running Varnish)"
kotaKat
It puts up a bit of a fight.
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).
codetrotter
Loads for me at the moment
bennydog224
Not to be a stickler, but the blog isn't actually FULLY hosted on the Wii until you move that Caddy instance to it or drop it :)
Nice work.
Wowfunhappy
The author should have just disabled TLS! It would have been perfectly reasonable under the circumstances, and then the website would have been fully Wii-hosted, no caveats!
pedroslopez
lol rare wowfun sighting made me happy (hi from nacho@atmosphir)
Bluecobra
Really impressed by how low the load average is (0.06 @15 min).
cactusplant7374
The status page doesn't seem to be updating....
allegrotim
this is pure beauty. Do you think something like this can be done on a NES? like a simple CGI website
zamadatix
Unfortunately the time you get to the point of even valid HTTP responses it will look less like a SNES and more like whatever-you-plugged-into-a-snes-for-power. E.g. the original Family Computer Network System addon already had more RAM and CPU power than the original console it attaches to just to interface as a modem at all, let alone something "basic" like CGI.
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).
jkrejcha
Yeah, the DS probably is the first one that has enough inbuilt support since it has support for Wi-Fi out of the box although Linux seems a bit heavyweight for this perhaps(?)
athom
This reminds me SO much of Atari's "Graduate Computer" attachment for the 2600.
Unfortunately, I can't find an accessible link from where I am right now. Maybe when I get back home...
echelon
> The Wii is probably the first Nintendo console where all the hardware you need to do this is fully built in
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.
zamadatix
Are you sure the Satellaview was available for the Famicom (NES)?
Dwedit
Whatever you end up doing on the NES would end up not being a website anymore. You want to interface with joystick port 1? Not TCP/IP anymore. Whatever gateway you would use to connect to the custom protocol would have a lot more oomph than a NES.
starkparker
if you can run a web server on a C64, you can in theory run one on the NES, but you'd have to find a way around the NES's relative RAM constraints
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)
joseda-hg
I don't think so without significant work, NES has only 2KB of RAM and an 8 bit CPU without MMU or many niceties taken for granted in General Purpose OS's
I doubt you can go much further back than Fifth Gen (of consoles) or so
jandrese
You would have to burn a cart that contained the webpage and TCP stack, as well as having the ethernet hardware, but there are tricks you can do to reduce the memory requirements. It's not going to be able to handle more than a packet or two at a time, but I've seen TCP stacks squeezed onto really low end hardware. Obviously you won't be able to open much of a TCP window so performance will be lousy, but it's a 1.8Mhz CPU so that was always going to be the case. Just don't have any misconceptions about being able to run TLS on it. Remember that TCP was developed on machines that did not have a lot of memory or even CPU cycles.
An Atari 2600 might be a bridge too far, but a NES should be able to do it.
joseda-hg
Fair enough, seems a lot simpler than what I had in mind with expansions and custom software, but also a far cry from OP's "flash" a general purpose OS and more or less get to working
KeplerBoy
Funny how that works. It's almost impossible on fifth gen but trivial on sixth gen (at least on the Xbox, which pretty much was a PC).
toast0
All the mainstream 6th gen consoles had first party support for wired ethernet; although only the Xbox had it built in (well, the slim ps2 had it built in too). I'd expect they've all served web pages at one time or another.
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'
anthk
You would be surprised with what a Jupiter Ace could do with few KB of RAM. Add a external module for serial <> PPP and the fun begins.
ObscureScience
Anyone knows if the Starlet co-processor is accessible from NetBSD?
For those unaware, the "SSL Added and removed here!" image is a reference to a diagram describing unencrypted communications between Google datacenters that leaked from the NSA in 2013 [1].
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/new-docs-show-ns...