How to locate a server geographically from URL

P i

1/6/23, 4:39 PM

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?

0 + 2

latency

geolocation

ceejayoz

1/6/23, 4:46 PM

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

1/6/23, 5:10 PM

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)

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: How to locate a server geographically from URL

TH: วิธีค้นหาเซิร์ฟเวอร์ตามภูมิศาสตร์จาก URL

RO: Cum să localizați un server geografic din URL

RU: Как найти сервер географически по URL

VI: Cách định vị máy chủ theo địa lý từ URL

Post an answer

Most people don’t grasp that asking a lot of questions unlocks learning and improves interpersonal bonding. In Alison’s studies, for example, though people could accurately recall how many questions had been asked in their conversations, they didn’t intuit the link between questions and liking. Across four studies, in which participants were engaged in conversations themselves or read transcripts of others’ conversations, people tended not to realize that question asking would influence—or had influenced—the level of amity between the conversationalists.