My girlfriend won a PS3 at work yesterday. So yeah, Christmas came early for me!  Before I started any gaming I wanted to see what the media centre capabilities were but I ran into some trouble with the wireless setup. Here’s what I did. This is not meant to be a beginners step by step guide but It will point you in the right direction if you run into this problem.

To start, I shared my broadband connection through my iMac’s in-built Airport, setting up a 40/64bit WEP passphrase in the process.  Then on the PS3 I went to the Network Settings menu and scanned for a wireless connection. It picked up my shared wireless connection right away, I then chose WEP for the security and entered the passphrase that I set up.

It seemed that was mistake number one.  The only way I could get this WEP key to work was to enter the HEX version of the passphrase.  OSX doesn’t show you the HEX version of your key so I popped over to this site : http://www.andrewscompanies.com/tools/wep.asp and entered a passphrase to get the HEX equivalent. So for example ASCII: fubar = HEX: 6675626172

I entered the 10 characther HEX key and that got me to the next step.

Note: Stronger encryption keys will be longer, 128bit WEP uses a 13 character passphrase or 26 character hex key.

The second place where I ran into trouble was with DHCP. It just doesn’t work for me with some devices. My iPod Touch gets its IP address without any trouble but the PS3 just wouldn’t. Luckily I had just been through the same trouble with my Nokia E51 last week so I knew that I had to assign addresses manually.

My iMac’s Airport issues addresses in the range 10.0.2.x, so I jumped into the PS3 custom network setup and manually assigned it an IP address of 10.0.2.5, subnet mask remains at 255.255.255.0,  the router address in this case is 10.0.2.1, and the DNS primary address I set to the address of my broadband router which is 192.168.1.1.

After that everything was up and running.

I fired up Nullriver MediaLink (which is just brilliant btw) to share media content from my iMac and I was browsing my movies and music from the comfort of my couch in no time.