bandwidth struggles and compy
Even though I am at 10k feet I am set back far enough on the mesa that my cell coverage is terrible; 0-2 bars of 3g right now. Even typing this on a terminal connection is slow. It would be impossible on the Wordpress platform.
Of course, the RedPocket-provisioned TMO has 0 bars. :-(
compy
compy is an http/https compression proxy. The http part (unencrypted web) is simple; catch the traffic, compress it, and pass it along.
The https part (encrypted web) is weirder. The proxy has to receive the data, unencrypt it, compress it, re-encrypt it, and pass it along. Basically one is performing a “man-in-the-middle” (mitm) attack on one’s own traffic.
Since the hacked traffic no longer passes the sniff test, you make CA (certifying authority) credentials for the proxy and tell your browser to trust that certificate.
There are many moving pieces here, so I simplified it by making the proxy only available to the remote server, then tunnel my traffic to that server.
With default settings compy-proxied web stuff is bearable on on this slow connection. The stats show ~25% compression overall during the last session but it feels like more:
compy exiting, total transcoded: 56301299 -> 42667882 (75.8%)
altogether now
- compy web proxy handles http/https traffic
- ssh tunnel from my laptop to the server, forwarding the web proxy port
- browser talks to what it thinks is a web proxy on my laptop, which is actually a tunnel to compy on the remote server
- I use tmux to multiplex the ssh session above for my own terminal uses. Waste not, want not.
I’ll use this setup to post some pics from a recent walk to the other side of the waterfall.
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