For those who have been trolling around with your PS3 on the Playstation Network might know that all the playable demos and stuff on the PS3 networks can be downloaded on your usual computer, and then later get your PS3 to fetch and install them. That way you won’t have to use your PS3 to download for whatever reasons (time, disk space, connection, etc).

This ps3news forum post has all the goodies and explanations, how it works and what you need to do, except, it hasn’t got a Linux way of doing it. I spent some time looking into that a few months ago, and I think I should note them down here, before I forget the method myself…

The basic idea is you configure your PS3 to use a proxy, and then you tell it to download and install Folding@Home. The proxy translates the URL into a different one, i.e. you tell your proxy to rewrite the Folding@Home URL into one that points to the actual package you want to install.

To achieve that, I’ve decided to use apache, squid, and jesred. Apache and squid might be bit overkill, but that’s what I have already been using. jesred is a URL redirector in Debian that works with squid.

The download part is the same. You look for the game/demo/whatever you want and download the package (.pkg file) using the URL on the forum post. Let’s say you’ve got the file blah.pkg. Put the file somewhere accessible from your web server. For example, /var/www/ps3/ on my machine proxy1, which means I can download the file on my local network via http://proxy1/ps3/blah.pkg.

On to the squid config. In /etc/squid/squid.conf, I first define an access control:

acl myps3 src 192.168.0.123
http_access allow myps3

which allows my PS3, having an IP 192.168.0.123, to access my proxy.

I also have to add a special header_access rule:

header_access Content-Type deny myps3

which makes the PS3 happy downloading the file. Without this, the PS3 seems to refuse to even start downloading the package.

Then finally, I setup the URL rewrite:

url_rewrite_program /usr/lib/squid/jesred

which tells squid to use jesred for URL rewriting.

Now we setup jesred. Edit /etc/jesred.acl to suit your own needs. I have simply uncommented the line:

0.0.0.0/0

which allows URL rewrite from all sources.

Then we move onto /etc/jesred.rules. This is where we define our URL rewriting. First you need to know which URL your PS3 is using for Folding@Home. A list of possible URLs are shown in the 2.D of the FAQ on the forum post. My PS3 is PAL one, so to rewrite that URL to what we want:

regexi ^http://deu01.ps3.download.playstation.net/download/ps3/eu/fah/fah\.pkg 

http://proxy1/ps3/blah.pkg

(The above on one single line)

Remember every time you edit the jesred.rules file, you have to tell squid to reload (/etc/init.d/squid reload does the trick).

Finally, onto the PS3. Make sure you have set your PS3 to use your proxy. Now tell your PS3 to download and install Folding@Home.

And that’s it! I know it hasn’t got a nice GUI like the PS3.Proxyserver thing. But surely editing some text config files and running init reload scripts are that kind of things we have a passion for right?

If things don’t work, well, you can have a look at squid’s and jesred’s log. You might need to edit /etc/jesred.conf to enable its logging.

Let me know if I’ve made any mistakes, comments are also welcome.