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.

<catty>  you know how with taiwanese or chinese, when your baby
         is one month old, you give out things like eggs and cakes and
         stuff like that to your relatives and friends...
<pigeon> yeah?
<catty>  we'll do similar things?
<pigeon> hmm, no, we'll give out linux live CDs...

I haven’t been using the ethernet bonding driver since I got my ASUS W7J laptop, as the ipw3945 doesn’t seem to work with it. But now I’ve switched over to iwl3945 driver, and it now seems to work pretty well with bonding again. Excellent!

For those who doesn’t know what bonding is, see my recent post.

So it had come to the last but not least day of LCA2008 - The Open Day.

Since last year, the Open Day has been yet another exciting day in LCA. There were over 30 booths hosted by different companies and organizations demonstrating their cool Linux and open source technologies.

I believe the ones that caught most attention would be the gaming booths where there were StepMania, Frets On Fire, and a bunch of open source games that were configured to use the wiimote.

And speaking of the wiimote, of course another highlight was Rusty’s Pong Hero. It was inspired by one of Johnny’s Lee wiimote project that uses the wiimote’s infrared camera and a infrared light to work together as a whiteboard. In Rusty’s case, you draw using a specially made infrared lipstick on the virtual whiteboard to play the classic Pong game. You can catch it in action on this video.

Overall the Open Day this year was great. Though I kinda hope for a better venue for it. Because it’s inside a building it’s kinda packed. I mean comparing to the one last year, LCA2007’s was a much better semi-opened area for things like Open Day.

I hung around till pretty much when then Open Day came to an end. I slowly strolled back to St Mary’s to get ready for my flight back to Sydney.

Goodbye LCA2008, and looking forward to LCA2009 in Tasmania.

Last day of the conference. There were a few interesting talks that I wanted to go to but a lot of them are at the same time. The not-so-bad thing is though almost all talks were recorded.

In the afternoon, among the few talks I was interested, I decided to head to the MythTV BOF, partly because I know the BOFs weren’t recorded. As a quite-long time MythTV user I find the BOF pretty interesting, however I wish there was more time for it. One of the brought up issues, and also an everlasting issue, was TV guide data in Australia. I always feel funny that it is so hard to get the data, as if they don’t want you to watch their programmes.

After the afternoon tea was the lightning talks, followed by the closing of the conference. To me lightning talks are always the cool and very entertaining. Of course this year’s talks were no exception, and I enjoyed them a lot.

After the closing was the Google party. It was right outside the university union house, so it’s kinda outdoor. The atmosphere was good, and I think pretty much everyone was there enjoying the drinks and the BBQ. The food was nice, but I wish there were a bit more variety.

I stayed around for a bit and headed back to St Mary’s common room. My friend and I joined another two guys (sorry I didn’t catch the names or I just forgot :() there for a game of table tennis. I haven’t really played any double myself so that was kinda of cool.

As my back blogging continues…

Day 4 is the Professional Delegates Network Session (PDNS) night. Shortly after all the talks of the day we headed down to the Melbourne museum, where the PDNS was held.

I was absolutely stunned by the museum, and I just couldn’t stopped taking photos. And as a result this also distracted me from the actual “networking”. I shall put up my LCA2008 photos real soon. There was the CSIRAC - Australia’s first computer, and there were many many other cool displays of various animals and bugs, like those awesome ant’s nests and spiders.

It’s a pity though that we were only allowed to be in a rather small area of the museum, and we couldn’t really go anywhere else.

There’s also one of those displays where you put on a specially made glasses to watch a few video clips in 3D.

The food was very nice as well! There was a few things with some kind of raw beef, some thing that a bit like sushi but not quite, raw oysters, usual but delicious sandwiches. Allow me to say that the PDNS food this year was better than last year’s :P