Web Server on a Nintendo Wii

Sijmen’s Wii

Wouldn’t you believe it, this site is running off my special home server: a Nintendo Wii with a 729 MHz PowerPC CPU and a whopping 64 MB usable RAM! It runs NetBSD 10.1 and serves this site exclusively over IPv6 – clients connecting through IPv4 are proxied via another server.

See Alex Haydock’s blog post that inspired this.

Also available on Gopher: gopher://wii.sjmulder.nl (proxy)

Network trouble

The only trouble I encountered while setting this up was with networking. I had originally purchased a UGREEN USB 2.0 Ethernet Adapter, which uses the AX88772A chip which supposedly works with the Wii, but it didn’t work in the Wii Menu (also not in the other USB port), nor in NetBSD where the axe driver repeatedly printed error messages about invalid buffers.

So instead I got the TP-Link USB 3.0 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter which uses the ubiquitous and widely supported Realtek 8153 chip. It’s not supported by the Wii Menu, but that’s fine – it works perfectly in NetBSD.

Setup

A fairly basic NetBSD 10.1 installation. I set up binary packages from pkgsrc:

wii# export PKG_PATH=https://cdn.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/powerpc/10.1/All wii# pkg_add pkgin wii# pkgin install git tmux fastfetch nostt ...

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