Whenever you are on the move, you probably check your mail over GPRS. Mostly,
GPRS providers offer you a data plan where you pay for the amount of data that
is being transferred between your mobile device and the server you are accessing
through the ISP.
Now, if the data is somehow compressed and sent across your mobile device,
then the amount of data transferred will be lesser. And that will result in
better experience of browsing and less expenditure on your GPRS bill as well.
Apart from these, it can also help in WAN optimization where you have to connect
two different machines over a low bandwidth network for sharing content over
HTTP. It also helps when you are connecting over dial-up to your ISP. For
example, you are working from your home computer which is connected to the
Internet via dial-up connection. Now if the ziproxy server is installed at your
enterprise, then you can simply route the HTTP traffic through ziproxy server
for remote users. It will compress the data before sending it to you and that
will save a good amount of time and money.
Using Ziproxy, the HTML content is compressed before sending it to your
mobile device or computer. The images are compressed; which means converting the
image to low quality JPEG and compressing the text or css using gzip. The
compression ratio can be set by you depending upon the requirement of your users
or client. The deployment of Ziproxy is quite simple. Place the Ziproxy server
on a public IP so that it can be accessed from anywhere on the globe. But for
sure, place this behind the firewall for security reasons. Reason for placing
the server on public IP is because the mobile device or remote client can
directly access the proxy server for accessing the Internet. The other option
would be to connect to the proxy server through your corporate VPN.
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We installed Ziproxy on Debian 4 machine with Intel Core2 Duo processor, 1 GB
RAM and 80 GB HDD. Before installing Ziproxy, there are some pre-requisites that
need to be installed, such as libungif, libpng, libjpeg-6b, zlib and libjasper.
Libungif contains library of functions for loading and saving GIF file formats
and libjasper is for implementing the JPEG 2000 compression standards into
Ziproxy.
Mostly, latest Linux distros already have these installed but for those which
don't have, you can get those from rpmfind.net. You also require to installs lex
compiler. For installing it in debian 4 run the following command:
To use Ziproxy, simply point your browser to its IP address and specified port number. |
# aptitude install flex
Once all the pre-requisites are installed, it's time to build up the Ziproxy
server. Download ziproxy from http://ziproxy.sourceforge.net. Since there are no
binaries available for Debian, we have to first compile the source and then
install it. After you have downloaded the file, untar the downloaded file and
run the following command;
# ./configure
# make
# make install
After Ziproxy is installed, it's time to start the proxy server. For this,
run the following command on the terminal:
# ziproxy —d
Now you have to configure something at client side also to get things
working. Open up the Internet explorer (configuration can be different for
different web browsers) go to Tools > Internet option. Next go to Connection tab
and click on the 'LAN setting' button. On the 'Proxy server' box, check the “Use
the proxy server ....” checkbox and provide the address of the Ziproxy server.
The default port of Ziproxy is 8080 which is configurable. Provide this on the
'port' textbox and save the settings.
Open up any web page that you visit the most and you will find the
difference, especially if the website contains lots of images. The image you see
below shows you the difference in the quality of the images. First with ziproxy
server and second without ziproxy server.
Here are some configuration tips you may like to have on your ziproxy server:
Notice the difference in image quality when you browse the Web with and without Ziproxy from your mobile device. |
For changing the default port find the following line and uncomment the port
= 8080 and replace the 8080 to the port number you like. But be sure no other
application is using that port.
## Port to listen for proxy connections
## default: 8080
# Port = 8080
You can also implement the authentication option using ziproxy, i.e. users
need to identify themselves in order to access the Internet. For this, find the
following line in the ziproxy.conf file:
# AccessLogFileName = "/var/log/ziproxy/access.log"
.
.
## HTTP auth file
## Should contain user:pass pairs, lines no longer than 128 chars
## Password is unencrypted
# PasswdFile="/etc/ziproxy/http.passwd"
Uncomment the 'PasswdFile' in order to implement user authentication and
'AccessLogFileName' to enable logging. Once this is done open up the file
http.passwd which can be found under '/etc/ziproxy/'.
This file contains username and password of those users who are allowed to
access. Enter you username and password here, in a format 'username:password'
and save the file. Now open any web site at the client machine and it will ask
for user authentication. Provide username and password to authorize yourself.