PS3: Get the latest firmware

My Synology NAS is really versatile and fulfills the most mundane tasks. At this point in time the NAS serves up my iTunes, streams HD-movies to the PS3, has all my software stored centrally, is used as an iPhoto server, manages my backups, acts as a Squid-caching server and now manages the PS3 firmware.

A rainy weekend and the realisation that my Perl skills totally suck, have eventually made me create a small application which produces the following:

Yes, a history of the latest PS3 firmwares. After having installed my Squid-proxy server, I noticed the traffic coming from the PS3. One of the URLs was quite interesting: http://fuk01.ps3.update.playstation.net/update/ps3/list/uk/ps3-updatelist.txt. When you open the URL you will see a text-file describing the latest firmware version as well as the download link.

It was (relatively) easy to write a shell-script which downloads the update-file, then checks if a new firmware was released and if so, it will download the file and then notify you via an email of it. If your NAS or Linux server runs HTTP, I have included a simple Perl-script which lists all the firmwares and allows you to download them.

You add the PS3-firmware checker to a crontab and by the time you check your email, you will be notified that the latest firmware has been downloaded already.

Of course, if you would like to have the same cool functionality, use Paypal below, donate anything you like and get the download instantly (remember: you need wget, perl and the knowledge of a text-editor to adjust a few settings in the script):