Dear followers: I am humbly asking for "likes" on this post to help me debug the alleged TLS errors some remote instances report when interacting with this one.

Do not pollute the fediverse by boosting, though.

Thank you. :)

Just another day in the life of a Nintendo Wii running NetBSD: A Grafana dashboard put together with metrics from netbsd_exporter[1] and Pound.

Not much going on over here, now that Pound and Snac have been tested for a bit and the configuration stabilized.

There is one remaining issue: Some remote instances keep submitting likes and such repeatedly and at various intervals (typically hours). As others using Snac are experiencing the same, at least I know it is not my platform.

Btw, the invitation still stands: If you want an account here, drop me a note and I'll see what I can do.

[1] https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/sysutils/netbsd_exporter/index.html

#Nintendo #Wii #snac #snac2 #NetBSD #Pound

@[email protected] Joined! Or applied, anyway ...

bow
The honour is mine. The hard work is done by others. I just get to play with the Lego pieces.

And this is what htop looks like soon after I posted the above. The Wii is working hard, but it handles it quite well, as it seems.

/me pats Wii on back good Wii, good NetBSD ;)

Well, this kinda blew up a bit. My original post here[1] has so far seen well over a hundred boosts, a new personal best :D

It has been suggested it is time to detail a bit about the configuration of this beast. Let's start with the basics: This is a straight-up #NetBSD 11rc2 installation on a stock #Nintendo #Wii. Many people have detailed how to install it, but one useful source of information is Alex Haydock's blog[2], and of course the NetBSD release documentation. The kernel config[3] is modified slightly from the default WII in an attempt to save a bit of memory.

Building #snac2 was straight forward; no difference from building on i486 or i686. Simply make and make install, with the -f Makefile.NetBSD (the NetBSD-specific makefile is included with the snac sources).

Since snac won't do TLS for inbound connections, a TLS proxy is needed. My go-to nginx isn't in the 11rc2 PPC package repository at the time of writing, so I built it from pkgsrc myself. This only took a couple of hours.. But alas, it's a bit too memory hungry for my taste, even with a minimal configuration.

Next up, I found ttp[4]. It is a very small and simple proxy server, which works fine but cannot serve static files, nor does it support TLS 1.3. It is also incapable of dropping privileges, and since I want to run it as nobody I had to find a different way to pass port 443 traffic to it.

Luckily, NetBSD has npf, a built-in firewall that can do NAT and which is fairly easy to configure (at least with the usual good documentation and examples included). Picking up port 443 and NATing it to a high port for ttp to handle worked fine - and allows me to easily move traffic from one TLS proxy to another while I experiment.

TTP wasn't without problems - but they turned out to not be entirely its fault. I kept getting connection failures and snac kept exiting for no obvious reason.

After some fiddling around, the snac author suggested[5] that I was running out of file handles, which is indeed the case. Adding ulimit -n 1024 to /etc/rc.d/snac solved that issue as well.

Then my thoughts landed on an old acquaintance of mine - pound[6]. This is a reverse proxy with good TLS support, and recent versions can even serve static files in a fairly simple way. After a couple of bug reports, lots of help by the current maintainer, and some more fiddling, I got the most recent versions to build. Once the next release drops (4.21), I'll have a go at doing my first pkgsrc port update :)

The pound configuration[7] now seems to be fairly complete, even keeping out most random scanning attacks (yes, they have already started).

[1] https://wii.cafe/ltning/p/1773014130.033156
[2] https://blog.infected.systems/posts/2025-04-21-this-blog-is-hosted-on-a-nintendo-wii/
[3] https://anduin.net/~ltning/WII_TINY
[4] https://github.com/Theldus/ttp
[5] https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2/issues/576
[6] https://www.gnu.org.ua/software/pound/manual/index.html
[7] https://anduin.net/~ltning/pound/wiicafe_pound.tgz

You cant find this place even in the deepest Wii iceberg...thats how you know its GREAT! :-.)

good video to binge if you're bored
https://youtube.com/watch?v=0nztuQdf-AE
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=0nztuQdf-AE

@[email protected] Surprisingly? The CPU is quite fast, and as long as I conserve RAM and don't do much disk I/O it feels adequate for the job so far. There's been a lot of responses and boosts to this post so it already has tentacles all over the fediverse by now.

No - I literally just built it. And NetBSD itself is already endian-agnostic. It's part of why this is .. deceptively simple. :)

NetBSD on Wii is just like on any other platform - unless software is targeting specific architectures, it tends to build just fine. Snac is a proper POSIX application, as are the other pieces of code I had to build. Hell, even fastfetch compiled, despite being a much bigger and more complex project than I thought 😀

@[email protected] According to Wikipedia it has 24 MB 1T-SRAM + 64 MB GDDR3 SDRAM; afaik only the latter is actually used by NetBSD. :)

I aim to please. :->

I have absolutely no idea. I'm gonna go with "not thousands". Probably even "not hundreds". Some absolute limits come to mind - max open files due to memory constraints, actual memory constraints, CPU constraints (those RSA signatures are slow and ActivityPub+EC crypto isn't a thing, for reasons I cannot comprehend), disk space constraints ....

Well I dunno .. I'm living in the future and there are still not flying cars to speak of, so is it really the future we were promised? Since there's not a lot of PPC going around either, I'm clinging to what I can..

Yes. At least the OS boots, I have not actually checked that all the services (TLS proxy and snac) start as they should, but I'm fairly sure they will. Should probably test that soon....

Yeah .. it's rather amazing when you look at the games on this thing .. well, the games it had before I replaced all the fun stuff with NetBSD ;)

It performs fine for the moment, but it quits from time to time for no apparent reason. It's not a memory issue; rather it seems to be hitting the max open files. I'll fix that shortly.

I would not, at this stage, recommend anyone move here ;D
Thank you for the kind words :)

...yes?

To anyone who may struggle to reach the site, I'm working on making sure it stays up. Snac sometimes exits under load (it doesn't "crash" - it's a clean exit) but I haven't yet figured out how.

Working on it; meanwhile, it auto-restarts after a second or so.

Thanks for reading ;)

Welcome to the Wii Cafe!

This instance is running #snac2 under #NetBSD on a Nintendo Wii. My DMs are open, let me know if you'd like an account here.