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How to locate a server geographically from URL

ke flag
P i

In order to minimize latency for HTTP GET/POST requests, I want to setup a linux box near the server.

Suppose for example the server is https://cdn1.telesco.pe

I've tried with traceroute and whois. i.e. running traceroute in theory returns the ip of each hop, and I should be able to whois on the latter hops.

But in practice traceroute returns line after line of hidden IPs before quitting:

> traceroute https://cdn1.telesco.pe
traceroute to https://cdn1.telesco.pe (149.154.167.99), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
 1  192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1)  1.128 ms  0.574 ms  0.889 ms
 :
 8  mx-ll-110.164.0-121.static.3bb.co.th (110.164.0.121)  182.163 ms
    mx-ll-110.164.0-247.static.3bb.co.th (110.164.0.247)  202.120 ms
    mx-ll-110.164.0-121.static.3bb.co.th (110.164.0.121)  181.422 ms
 9  * * *
10  * * *
:
63  * * *
64  * * *

And as I understand whois is hit and miss as:

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) handles splitting all the IPV4 and IPV6 addresses to 5 different Regional Internet Registries (RIR).

(ref)

Is a request to https://cdn1.telesco.pe always going to land at the same physical server? And if not, how is this decided?

Would it help to make an actual HTTP GET and somehow inspect the packet routing?

Is there some science to this? Or is it an impossible task?

vn flag
Whois won't work for this; Google IPs may geolocate to California even when they're physically located in Australia. Fire up VMs at several different locations (AWS is good for this) and benchmark latency.
P i avatar
ke flag
P i
Great! I found online tools like https://tools.keycdn.com/ping that give a rough indication (i.e. I can see cdn1.telesco.pe is somewhere in the USA)
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