Ricky Ford

The PlayStation Network is notorious for slow download speeds on the PS4. I have a 60mb/6mb connection at home, and for a 30GB game to download, the PS4 told me that it would take nearly 48 hours in total to download it all. Ridiculous if you ask me.

If you have a Debian server available then you'll appreciate the fact that you can combine a Squid3 proxy server and your Debian server together to create a middle-man to help the PS4 take better advantage of your download speeds.

First off, let's install Squid3 in the terminal by issuing the following command:

sudo apt-get install squid3 squid3-common

After everything has been installed, go ahead and edit the Squid3 config file like so:

sudo nano /etc/squid3/squid.conf

Once inside of the Squid3 configuration file, we want to secure it a bit so that we are only allowing traffic from within our local network and not leaving our server open to the internet for them to take advantage of.

You first want to issue a search command and search for:

TAG: acl

Once you've reached this area, look for the acl localhost line and modify it so that it looks like the following:

acl localhost src 127.0.0.1/32
acl localnet src 10.1.1.0/24

You need to pay close attention to the "acl localnet" option. My internal IP address scheme follows "10.1.1.*" so that all of my addresses begin with 10.1.1. Some internal networks start with 192.168.1.* or even 192.168.0.* - whatever yours may be, modify that line so that the first three octets of the IP address follow your internal network's, but leave the "0/24" at the end.

Now, issue another search within this file for:

TAG: http_access

Look for this block of comment text:

# Example rule allowing access from your local networks.
# Adapt localnet in the ACL section to list your (internal) IP networks
# from where browsing should be allowed

...something in here...

# And finally deny all other access to this proxy
http_access deny all

...modify that "...something in here..." string to look like the following:

http_access allow localnet
http_access allow localhost

After you've got that, save the file and then we need to restart Squid3 with the following command:

sudo service squid3 restart

After Squid3 has restart (it might take a few seconds) you need to modify your network settings on your PS4 to be set to direct all traffic through the proxy. Do this by going into Settings, Network, Set Up Internet Connection, and then follow through everything until you get to the "Proxy Server" section. Click the "Use" button and then for the Address box enter the IP address of your machine that has Debian/Squid3 installed, and then for the port, enter 3128 (the default Squid3 port).

After you've modified the settings, go ahead and test the internet connection through the PS4 and check out your downloads. Mine went from needing 48 hours to download the 31GB Madden 17 game to only needing 2 hours. I'm not 100% sure if this is using my entire 60mb/6mb connection, but I do know that I'd much rather wait 2 hours instead of 48.

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