Compressing/decompressing traffic & cache & unchanged ip

[Oleksandr Samoylyk]

Hello World!

I've a "strange" idea. Here I've outlined the plan:

========================================================

Compress traffic   Uncompress traffic   Compress traffic
       here              & cache               here
  ___________          _________          ___________
  |          |         |        |         |          |
--|  Router  |         |  Our   |         |  Router  |--
--| in city1 |-------->| ROUTER |<--------| in city2 |--
  |__________|         |________|         |__________|
                          |
                          |
          ________________|________________
          |       |       |       |       |
                     Our clients

========================================================

So, let me describe the situation. We have our central router and 
several router in different places. Unfortunately, we haven't got a good 
connection to them. Our physical "link" to them is quite "narrow". 
Nevertheless, our "external" routers are good connected to the "world" 
(they have megabit uplinks). We can't at the moment got a better 
connection between them and our central router :(.
The ultimate aim is to speed up bandwidth for our clients by means of 
software :)
We had been using a transparent cache-server (Squid) for some time, but 
it has the problem (as all proxies have). It changes ips of clients.
I'd a sort of brain-wave :) and thought out the following:
- On those routers we compress traffic (how?)
- On our main router we decompress it and cache it (how?)
- Moreover, it should be done transparently and without substitution of ip for client. So client even don't "feel" that he/she is behind proxy or so...  So everywhere should be ip of user not Squid one. (how?)
- In addition to that it would be good to do this with HTTP and FTP as well...

I've heard about Layer 7 switches that IMHO can do this things...
I'd like to realize something like that on Unix.

I'll appreciate any help.

Thanks!

-- 
  Oleksandr Samoylyk
  OVS-RIPE