One of the biggest obstacles I had to deal with, while trying to develop some Cell BE programs on my PS3, was the Screen Resolution of my Non-HDTV. This guide covers how to do remote programming on the PS3 with SSH and SSHFS and get around this problem.

This is a screenshot of my Apple Powerbook 17″.
I used SSH and SSHFS to connect to my PS3.
Click here (296 KB) for fullscreen size.

While my Display(Apple Cinema 23″) is well capable of displaying of 1080i and even beyond, it lacks of HDCP, and thus I couldn’t hook it up my PS3 to it, without any third party equipment. What I did instead, was to connect it with a standard RGB-Cable Set to the composite slot of the TV-Card in my PC. This gave me a picture, but only in 768×576 PAL-Mode. This is propably fine, if you’re just going to work in Terminal Mode, but to be honest my usual development enviroment looks different.

I like to have a dozen different windows open at a time, including my e-mail client, IM and iTunes. I also like to work on different OSs including Mac OS X and Windows, so I tryed to find a different solution and I found my personal holy grail in SSH and SSHFS instead of Samba.

So, what is SSH?

Secure Shell or SSH is a network protocol that allows data to be exchanged over a secure channel between two computers.

SSH is typically used to log into a remote machine and execute commands, but it also supports tunneling, forwarding arbitrary TCP ports and X11 connections; it can transfer files using the associated SFTP or SCP protocols.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ssh

And SSHFS?

SSHFS (Secure SHell FileSystem) is a file system for Linux (and other operating systems with a FUSE implementation, such as Mac OS X or FreeBSD) capable of operating on files on a remote computer using just a secure shell login on the remote computer.

The practical effect of this is that the end user can seamlessly interact with remote files being securely served over SSH just as if they were local files on his/her computer. On the remote computer the SFTP subsystem of SSH is used.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sshfs

Sounds nice? This is what you need:

• A PS3 hooked up to your LAN. Write down the IP address.
• A SSH Daemon your PS3
• Access to the standard SSH TCP port 22.

You can get the SSH Daemon by installing OpenSSH, if you haven’t already. On Fedora Core 6 type:

yum install openssh

The Daemon should get enabled by default.

That’s it for SSH Access. You can now access your PS3 with any SSH Client of your liking.
I recommend PuTTY for Microsoft OSs, OpenSSH for any Linux Distrubution and Mac OS X users should have one by default.

Open up a Terminal and type:

ssh user@10.0.1.3

Replace user with your default PS3 Linux Username and 10.0.1.3 with the IP of your PS3.
You’ll be prompted for the password associated with the Username you used, type it in and you’re good to go.

If you want to end your SSH Session, type:

logout

Next up: SSHFS

Linux:

To enable SSHFS in your remote Linux Distrubution, you need to have the FUSE Module loaded. It was enabled by default in my remote Fedora installation, if it’s not for you, you need to recompile your Kernel. Make sure you have a M before File Systems->Filesystem in Userspace support or set FUSE_FS=M in your Kernel config-file.

If the module hasn’t been loaded already, type:

modprobe fuse

You can get the sshfs client with yum or get it here. For yum, type:

yum install fuse-sshfs

Now you need to create a directory to act as mountpoint for the PS3 Filesystem. Mine is in /mnt/ps3.

mkdir /mnt/ps3

Change the user permissions for that directory with chown, if needed.

chown $USER /mnt/ps3

And finally:

sshfs user@10.0.1.3:/ps3_dir /mnt/ps3

Again, change user and the IP according to your PS3 Settings. /ps3_dir is the remote directory you’d like to mount, and /mnt/ps3 is the directory we created in the previous step. For example:

sshfs root@10.0.1.3:/root /mnt/ps3

This will mount the root directory of your PS3 to /mnt/ps3.

You’ll be prompted for the password of the user associated with that PS3 Account. Type it in.

If you want to unmount the filesystem, type:

fusermount -u /mnt/ps3

Mac OS X:

Download and install the three MacFuse Packages. Reboot.
Start sshfs and type in username and IP of the PS3.
Additional information can be found here.

Microsoft Windows:

There’s no SSHFS for Windows to my knowledge. You can try WinSCP or enable SAMBA on your PS3. However, I haven’t tried this yet, so you’re on your own to figure that one out.