Regarding SNEEK...

I know that as soon as you read the title of my post, many insults raced across your mind, and both Mods and Admins alike would fight over who would get to send this post to the junkyard, but I ask you to hear me out first.

It came to me as a shocking suprise when I first heard about the possibility of having a 100% un-brickable Wii through the use of NAND emulation, and then soon after finding out it was now a forbidden application to discuss due to it's ability to load backups with ease. I could've lived WITHOUT knowing about this feature, and wouldn't have cared even if I did find out, since I find it one of the most stupidest methods from which to load games. That is, comparing it to the other available methods.

What really interested me was the potential of working in a, how shall we say, "disposable" environment. If something at one point would break down the emulated NAND, it would all be a matter of replacing it with a sane one, all from the comfort of an everyday computer, as opposed from having to buy an expensive NAND programmer and developing decent soldering skills in order to fix the real physical one. It also interested me because it would work very well as a tool to determine the sanity of NAND dumps from other Wiis, as well as having the potential of manually trying out relatively dangerous things such as custom themes and channels in a rather realistic yet safe environment.

What I'd like to ask is if discussion of SNEEK was allowed, but only limited to it's use as a tool for either repair (more like... testing solutions before instructing on some of the more difficult issues on faulty NANDs) or development, and possibly as a security alternative to bootmii as an IOS (which we all now is quite pointless) and Priiloader. Instructions on how to install it and such would not be up for discussion, however. And it's rather questionable alternative uses would remain forbidden.
I just figured it was worth asking since the discussion of cIOS that enable functionality of several useful applications is allowed, but it's installation is not.

I do hope that, while I was clearly bending the rules when I said my post would not contain anything related to "backup loaders", you would at least take into consideration this idea of mine. If not, I apologize for bringing it up.

I think SNEEK did NAND emulation at the IOS level (intercepting the calls, and implement those by reading/writing the SD), requiring a cIOS, something we no longer seem to support (no need for homebrew to have a cIOS, and piracy depends on it)
Also, NAND emulation will never fully protect you, it would still be possible to read/write to the NAND trough direct register access, like bootmii does for example.

SNEEK is undoubtably a very useful tool, which many use regularly. Sadly, crediar made the decision to add backup loading to the tool, and the option to enable this is very obvious in the easy GUI installer for SNEEK/UNEEK. For this reason, I (and I believe the rest of the admin/mods here) feel it is inappropriate for discussion in any sort on these forums.

In my opinion, if you are advanced enough a user to be trying to do the more dangerous things that you want to try in SNEEK first, you should be able to setup SNEEK, and also find places where you can get support (its google code page, IRC etc.). If not, I seriously doubt you should be attempting anything which you feel is too dangerous to try outside of SNEEK.

I'm sure some others will pop in and leave their opinions, so I won't close this topic for now, although someone else may.

I still have SNEEK v1 (which doesn't have the loader) and I use it sometimes because my brother won't let me put the HBC on the Wii. (I have BootMii boot2 and I can just insert my SD card and load my own NAND with custom channels and such), So yes it is very useful but of course you must be able to set it up yourself.

Quote
bg4545
I still have SNEEK v1 (which doesn't have the loader) and I use it sometimes because my brother won't let me put the HBC on the Wii. (I have BootMii boot2 and I can just insert my SD card and load my own NAND with custom channels and such), So yes it is very useful but of course you must be able to set it up yourself.

In the current GUI installler, there is still an option to setup SNEEK/UNEEK without backup loading. Also, I assume you actually mean v2, as v1 was the version which was released and pulled very quickly, as it violated some licenses.

What we really need is a modified installer that does not have the option to configure it with backup loading capability.

The installer isn't open source, so it would have to be written from scratch, but it may be possible. If I can contact crediar, I may try to throw something together quickly (it'd be Windows only most likely if I do try it). From what I can see, it seems reasonably straightforward.