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

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Screenshot of htop running on the Wii. pound and snac processes both hovering between 1 and 2 MB resident memory.

Happy International Pi Day! Celebrating the infinite possibilities of clean code and extreme portability.

What a better day to remind everyone: Of course it runs NetBSD! 🚩

#NetBSD #PiDay #PiDay2026 #OpenSource #RetroComputing #RunBSD #linux

#NetBSD #PiDay2026

Do you want to come to Brussels, mingle with BSD people, perhaps do a talk, a tutorial or a BOF session?

The Call for papers https://2026.eurobsdcon.org/cfp/ is open until June 20th, for the conference in Brussels September 9-13, 2026.

We also offer pre-submission guidance/mentoring, see within.

Wonder what BSD and the conferences are about? See https://nxdomain.no/~peter/what_is_bsd_come_to_a_conference_to_find_out.html

@EuroBSDCon #freebsd #netbsd #openbsd #freesoftware #libresoftware #brussels #bruxelles

What about a nice Midnight Commander-style TUI to manage cells interactively? 🤔

https://netbsd-cells.petermann-digital.de

#netbsd #cellsfornetbsd #tui #devops #modernretrocomputing

Further working on a modern out of the box experience of "Cells for NetBSD". Stay tuned 🙂

#netbsd #cells

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cellmgr reconciling a fleet of cells from a manifest

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cellui showing a TUI listing running cells (here with synthwave theme, switchable of course)

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...browser shown the placeholder site of the just deployed service landscape

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.

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Screenshot from fastfetch showing OS version and hardware platform: NetBSD 11.0-RC2, evbppc, CPU PPC750

Latest 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀 - 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲/𝟬𝟯/𝟬𝟵 (Valuable News - 2026/03/09) available.

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2026/03/09/valuable-news-2026-03-09/

Past releases: https://vermaden.wordpress.com/news/

#verblog #vernews #news #bsd #freebsd #openbsd #netbsd #linux #unix #zfs #opnsense #ghostbsd #solaris #vermadenday

Latest 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀 - 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲/𝟬𝟯/𝟬𝟵 (Valuable News - 2026/03/09) available.

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2026/03/09/valuable-news-2026-03-09/

Past releases: https://vermaden.wordpress.com/news/

#verblog #vernews #news #bsd #freebsd #openbsd #netbsd #linux #unix #zfs #opnsense #ghostbsd #solaris #vermadenday

I couldn't make it happen. I can get NetBSD set up with networking and the default X11 window manager, but when I try to get it to log in via XDM with Xfce, the system crashes, and killing the VM trashes the filesystem.

I couldn't find a clear, up-to-date tutorial on how to make this happen in NetBSD 10, and the NetBSD Handbook really didn't provide a complete recipe.

Just stumbled on http://bsdsec.net and damn, it’s perfect.All the security advisories & errata from #OpenBSD, #FreeBSD, #NetBSD, #MidnightBSD and the rest… all in one dead-simple page.
👉https://bsdsec.net

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bsdsec.net

#Retrocomputing #UNIX #SlowComputing

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Neofetch output showing the config: NetBSD 11.0 RC2, AMD 486-class CPU, 128MB RAM

This weekend is the perfect time to get your #eurobsdcon submissions done!

The Call for papers https://2026.eurobsdcon.org/cfp/ is open until June 20th, for the conference in Brussels September 9-13, 2026.

We also offer pre-submission guidance/mentoring, see within.

Wonder what BSD and the conferences are about? See https://nxdomain.no/~peter/what_is_bsd_come_to_a_conference_to_find_out.html

@EuroBSDCon #freebsd #netbsd #openbsd #freesoftware #libresoftware #brussels #bruxelles

OpenBSD wasn't able to run snac stable on this machine, it crashed after a few requests with "illegal instruction".

#snac #snac2 #fediverse #activitypub #NetBSD #OpenBSD #retrocomputing #retroserver #retrohardware #pentiumii #pentium2 #oldhardware

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Open 19" 90's rack Case with a green motherboard in it and old grey ribbon cables connected to a dvd drive and a ssd. there are two addon cards in the pci slots and two slot 1 pentium ii cpus with fans installed. The 4:3 screen shows a fastfetch output giving stats of the machine , an htop screen with two cpu usage graphs and snac log

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green motherboard with two pentium ii slot 1 cpus