Hi, I’m planing to migrate a rather busy server to the CDN, however part of the traffic is consumed via rsync. Is it possible to make rsync work even though the primary point of contact is fastly? I’m not sure if rsync follows redirects or anything like.
If that’s not possible, how do you suggest to implement mirrors aka third party entities like universities and such that like to have the data available independently of a CDN?
I don’t think it is possible to have rsync connections work when Fastly’s endpoints are the ones receiving the connections (after the DNS changes have been made for HTTP/S traffic). rsync does not use HTTP and doesn’t connect on the ports used for HTTP/S, so those connection attempts would just timeout.
I can’t think of any practical solution other than putting the rsync traffic onto its own hostname, and then leaving those DNS records pointing directly to the origin instead of to Fastly. For example, if the site is currently named mirrors.univ.edu and handles both HTTP/S and rsync traffic, you’d create a new DNS name rsync.mirrors.univ.edu which has the same A/AAAA record values as the current site, and convince your rsync users to switch to that name.
Once a sufficient percentage of them have switched you’d make the DNS changes for mirrors.univ.edu to land at Fastly instead of the origin servers.
Thanks Kevin, that’s exactly what we ended up doing!