[Gllug] compression puzzle

[Murray]

I've been playing with my laptop, mobile phone & gprs.  Slow, ridiculously
expensive network.  (Orange =~ £1/Mb, but T-Mobile =~ £7.50/Mb!!)

Prime candidate for ssh's -C option I thought.  So this made sense, given it
uses the same algorithm as gzip

  scp me at remote.net:/home/me/test.txt .
  test.txt  100%   64KB   3.2KB/s   00:19

compared to:

  scp -C me at remote.net:/home/me/test.txt .
  test.txt  100%   64KB  28.3KB/s   00:02

but this seems rather odd, as compressed files shouldn't re-compress:

  scp me at remote.net:/home/me/gzip.txt.gz .
  gzip.txt.gz  100%  306KB   3.0KB/s   01:41

  scp -C me at remote.net:/home/me/gzip.txt.gz .
  gzip.txt.gz  100%  306KB  33.7KB/s   00:09

any idea how ssh's compression manages it?  and how can I use my home
server, connected via adsl to act like a "masquered" box?

namely, redirect all the network traffic on my laptop via ssh (and -C) to
the home server, which then un-compresses/un-ssh's it, and does the
resulting network access as if it was it's own, then compress's/ssh's up the
result and forwards it back to my laptop.

30Kb/s over gprs seems quite impressive, even if the initial connection is
very slow. (ping's around ~1 sec)

another thought : if I setup squid on the home (adsl'd) server with
keep-alives enabled, and use that as a proxy from my laptop with an http/1.1
browser and tunnel the whole thing over ssh using -C, does this mean
(secure) mobile surfing at ~30Kb/sec?

any pointers appreciated ...

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