homelab

Sijmen Mulder has setup their Nintendo Wii to serve their website running NetBSD. If you coonect over IPv6 the files are served directly from the Wii, IPv4 traffic is proxied through another host which speaks to the Wii over IPv6.

It's always fun to see projects like this, Sijmen links to Alex Haydock's blog post where they also host their website on a Wii and further link to more inspiration!

See also This blog is running on a recycled Google Pixel 5 by Dom Corriveau with my notes for more.

I discovered this via Hacker News.

I'm a fan of discovering weird places to host web servers from and a disposable vape pen microcontroller might be the weirdest. Bogdan Ionescu setup their server on a PUYA PY32F002B with 24KiB of flash storage and 3KiB of RAM. They used slattach to convert the serial connection to the microcontroller into a network interface and uIP for the TCP/IP stack. A lot to unpack in the full article.

Discovered via The Morning News.

Dom Corriveau runs his blog of an old Pixel 5, they also mention kaimac.org who I previously read about running their website of an ESP32, and compose.party which was new to be me and is also a website that is run on solar power and off a phone. Lots of interesting links to read through from the blog post along with instructions to replicate.

Discovered via 82MHz' Linkdump.

ICANN finally allocates the .internal TLD for private use after discussions first started in 2020. This means we can now use .internal domains on a private network without fear of it being up for grabs and resolvable to something else in the future. To prevent this previously you could purchase a domain name and use that or subdomains of that for internal use so you always control what is resolves to.

Resolved (2024.07.29.06), the Board reserves .INTERNAL from delegation in the DNS root zone permanently to provide for its use in private-use applications. The Board recommends that efforts be undertaken to raise awareness of its reservation for this purpose through the organization's technical outreach.

Between 2020 and now, ICANN opened the proposal for public comments which was summarised in PDF form. ICANN received responses from various groups like various ICANN committees, Amazon and Google. The majority of valid responses were in favour of using .internal with the others in support of the idea but asking for a shorter TLD.

j6b72ss article covers the precise reasons why I stayed away from Traefik thinking of it as a container-first proxy. The author, however, explores how Traefik is used in their environment with static binaries. Over the last few years Ive moved towards containerisation, so maybe Traefik might even be a better fit over using Nginx for everything regardless.

The HN comments have some interesting discussions on how this compares to Caddy for containers, most leaning towards Caddy.

One of the HN comments from johanbcn pointed out an interesting documentation framework called Diátaxis which I will take a look at.