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Comment by silotis | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare's lack of EDNS doesn't prevent DNS based routing. It can still be done based on the DNS request's source address. This will be the IP of the Cloudflare POP closest to the client.

Lack of EDNS only makes DNS based routing slightly worse if your CDN has a POP density similar-or-greater-than Cloudflare's.

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Correct. Cloudflare's POP routing is quite extensive, and I'd be shocked if archive.is had more than a handful of backends it's routing to.

Even so, why would an extra few dozen ms matter at all? Archive.is appears to be spindle-limited, is a client with marginally higher RTT an issue? The admin is silly.

https://www.cloudflare.com/network/

It seems so silly and mysterious that it makes me wonder if archive.today wants exact client IP addresses for some other unstated reason. (It's not clear how/if archive.today, a possibly illegal site, brings in revenue?).

The whole thing is very odd.

There is another reason but it is stated here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971650 (routing people to the nearest server _outside_ their own country).

> it makes me wonder if archive.today wants exact client IP addresses for some other unstated reason

They still get the client ip from the request to the service itself (unless you're using a VPN, but if you're using a VPN then archive wouldn't get your ip from your DNS request either).

Do you happen to have a mapping of Cloudflare IP space to physical POPs?

To the best of my knowledge they do not publish this, which makes it quite a chore to track all their edge locations manually.

You could probably take their network map SVG and convert the circle coordinates from integer Mercator projection points to lat/lon pairs, and then map them to cities.

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