Usually an anycast ip can be located say in the US, but the server itself thats sending the request is located in Europe. I'm wondering if there's anyway of finding out where the server is located.
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Probably not...– Tom O'ConnorJul 19, 2011 at 17:33
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2 Answers
The TTL counter on the packet will give you an idea as to how many hops it passed through to get to you, but other then that backtracking such a packet is nigh-impossible without access to large parts of the transmission path.
answered Jul 19, 2011 at 17:37
You won't be able to get coordinates good enough to drop a nuke, but a traceroute will tell you the network path, which can often be descriptive enough (with rDNS and some whois) to give you a fair idea where you're talking to. Depending on the service, also, some anycast providers give some way of telling which server/cluster you're talking to for diagnostic purposes (I've seen this most commonly with anycast DNS providers, for which you query a specific TXT record that's different for every cluster).
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could you give me an example query? I didn't know you could query an ip address. Jul 19, 2011 at 18:05
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Where did I say you can query an IP address? What would that even mean?– womble ♦Jul 19, 2011 at 18:12