# The security of web acceleators?

## shgadwa

Right now I have a router that I built myself. It has pfsense 1.2.3 (based on FreeBSD) installed on it and its the best router I've ever used. Very efficient and very secure. On the router, I have squid 2.7 installed as well as videocache 1.9.2. It caches youtube videos as well as google videos, and a few others. 

My problem is that traffic shaping on my router does not work with squid. Also, I need a better network monitor. So, my thinking is that I'll make another computer that will probably have 2GB of ram or so and I'll use that as my squid server. I'd want to install gentoo hardened on it and I'd like it to be used as a network data collector as well. I'm thinking it would also be great if I could use it as my local apache server. I need apache for videocache anyhow and I'd like to move my web server outside of my laptop. 

Another thing I'm thinking about doing is to use a web accelerator service so that our files are compressed by 70-90% before they get to us. This would help us a lot because we have satellite and can only download 500MB/day (except we can download as much as we want from 2-7:00 AM). My only concern is, what do they do with our information?? Thats hardly a gentoo question. Most of these companies claim that they don't do anything with your info. One service that is better than all of the others because it compresses most protocols, not just HTTP, is called toonel.net and its actually free. When its free, I'd think that theres a greater chance of them using your info. But, when asked, they say, "You should always take measures to protect your information and use personal firewalls. The major components of the service are open source projects and are secure and reliable. All SSL connections remain secure with toonel.net."

Soooo, first, what do you guys think of the security of web accelerators? Secondly, is there anything that can be done with the gentoo server on our end (maybe encryption or something) that would make our info more secure? Thirdly, is there anything else that you guys think I should do with my gentoo server to get it to be more efficient and save on bandwidth as well as be more secure?

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