[clue-tech] Compress ICP traffic for hierarchical squid proxy servers?

[Jim Ockers]

Hi CLUEbies,

Does anyone know off the top of your head if a pair of squid proxies
can be forced to gzip the content passed between them using ICP?

If I put a pair of cooperating squid proxy servers on either side of 
a very slow network connection, with one of them on a fast internet
connection, it makes sense to me that the "upstream" proxy could
compress whatever it gets (particularly text/html content) when it
sends the data to the "downstream" proxy.

Does anyone know how to get this to work?  I did some googling and it
doesn't seem like squid wants to do this natively.  There was some
talk about squid and on-the-fly compression on some lists over the
years but they all assume squid is talking to web servers and web
browsers, not another instance of squid.

I just want the two squids to compress their traffic to save bandwidth
on the slow expensive link.

Vee haff vays of getting it to work such as forcing the squid peers
to talk through a compressed ssh tunnel using ssh local port redirection.
But I was hoping that the upstream squid could just gzip everything it 
sends over the slow link and the downstream squid could just un-gzip it.

What do you CLUEbies think would be the best way to do this?

Thanks,
Jim

-- 
Jim Ockers, P.Eng. (ockers at ockers.net)
Contact info: please see http://www.ockers.net/