Hosting your own website comes with challenges and benefits. Finding the right hardware and software to bring everything together can make all the difference when it comes to performance. However, sometimes you just want to cobble together a project because it's fun — not because you necessarily should. That's the impetus behind Alex Haydock's Infected Systems blog, which runs on an old Nintendo Wii.
Haydock says he likes the idea of using old hardware to play around with open-source operating systems, which led him toward this project. It all began when he was researching NetBSD on the official website. While perusing the different editions available to download, Haydock came across an option to download a version for the Nintendo Wii.
If you're not familiar with NetBSD, it's an open-source Unix-like operating system that is totally free to use. It's also regularly maintained and has been made available for a handful of different CPU architectures and devices — including the PowerPC that's used in the Wii. The Wii edition's most recent release came out in December of 2024.
Haydock set up the Wii-hosted blog by preparing a 32GB SD card using Raspberry Pi imager to unpack and install the Wii image downloaded from the NetBSD website. This image is designed to operate like a typical homebrew app and can be booted from the Wii's Homebrew channel.
When the NetBSD operating system loads, you can interact with it like a regular PC using a USB keyboard. From there, it was just a matter of selecting a hosting application that would allow him to power his blog. Haydock opted to use lighttpd for the web server along with Caddy as a reverse proxy. The encryption and certificate management is addressed using ACME.
There are a lot more details shared by Haydock explaining the setup process. The pages load pretty quickly, and while the current status only shows 21 hours of uptime, we're not sure why the system restarted — it might have been planned maintenance. We suspect the server won't cope very well if thousands of users suddenly hit the blog at the same time, but perhaps that can be part of the experiment. It's a fun and impressive yet whimsical setup, regardless.
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