All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
DNSTools feedback wanted!
Back in 2007, I launched https://dnstools.ws/, primarily focused on DNS lookups.
At the start of 2020 I completely rewrote the site, focusing on a better user experience, improving the performance, and adding the ability to perform DNS lookups, pings, traceroutes, etc. from several locations around the world - currently around 30 locations. There’s a few other sites that have features like this, but a lot of them have a pretty poor UI (eg. they just show raw traceroute
output) so I was attempting to make a better one. I've also open-sourced the codebase.
The ping tool lets you either ping one host from multiple locations, or multiple hosts from one location, which is something I don't think I've seen in similar tools.
I recently realised that even though there's been some discussion about the site on this forum, I've never asked for feedback directly. I'd love to gather some feedback about the site - things you like, things that could be improved, new features that you'd like to see, etc. There's a list of existing feature requests on GitHub.
Thanks!
Comments
Hello! I took a quick look at the site awhile back. I think the site looks quite nice! I haven't tried the tools yet, so I can't comment on them. Open source is great! Now I'm gonna go look at the sources. . . . Thank you! 🍫
This looks pretty slick. One comment from my first look: in the following traceroute, the penultimate hop is identified as "Los Angeles", but the router is definitely in the NYC metro area. The IP is in a block SWIPed to DediPath, with a Hockessin address, so you're not getting "Los Angeles" from there. Not clear whether it's supposed to be the location of the company or of the router, but either way I think the output is misleading/wrong there.
Edit: Oh, yeah. Definitely something weird going on. Pretty obviously, packets aren't getting from BHS to France in <1 ms. 😆
A full DNS overview would be great!
https://dnsape.com does it really well
I'm using MaxMind's free GeoIP database, which says that
45.92.192.123
is in Los Angeles. You can try it here: https://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip-demoAll of these are wrong too:
https://db-ip.com/ is a lot better but they don't have a free plan, and their paid plans are really out of my price range given I make no money from the site.
https://ipinfo.io/ looks decent (not as good as DB-IP, but better than MaxMind) and it looks like they have a free plan for up to 50k requests per month. I'll try their database and see how well it works.
I'll track it here: https://github.com/Daniel15/dnstools/issues/77
This is interesting. Looks like they just query for every type of record. I could add something like that, but I'd need to think of how to format it well, since I'd want to allow you to do it from multiple locations.
The other feedback that came to mind immediately is, I hope you're doing something to keep the multi-source pings from getting abused.
This is a really nice tool, though. And, even though I don't really care about the fancy graphics, I'm happy to see that you have nice bright letters against that dark background. My eyes aren't what they used to be.
Its a great feature. Especially if you would like to query what services a domain is using.
a clickable logo which port back to the homepage would be nice, thanks!
The site looks great, congrats! I played around with the tools, good speed and seems accurate!
One other thing... I've been thinking of rebranding it at some point given it's not just for DNS lookups any more. I have the domains
mtr.to
andnetworktest.org
and was thinking about using the latter. What do you think?I've just swapped MaxMind for ipinfo.io. Let me know if it looks better now
I tried your particular query from Austria and it seems better: https://dnstools.ws/traceroute/na1.distiq.net/?proto=Ipv4&workers=at
The form to run a tool is at the bottom of every page, which should in theory minimise the need to go to the home page (since you can just scroll down to the bottom).
Having said that, I think this is a good idea and I've been thinking about adding a nav bar at the top of the page for a while. Just not sure what to put in it.
That sounds good!!
networktest seems more descriptive; mtr too obscure.
It does. Though, at first I thought your site was badly-broken when trying to trace to OVH, but, no. Looks like maybe they are filtering ICMP after some point? Even internally. I wonder whether their DDoS protection is on right now, since that's not an issue I remember seeing in the past.
@Daniel15 good Lord how many other best domain names are with you?
note: yes i usually use your dnstools.ws cz the result is very informative, thx
I've been using this for around three years now.
I was going to suggest that you move the domain from that .ws ccTLD but seems like you already have that in mind
Yeah it's showing its age a bit... I bought it back in 2007 when .ws was popular, similar to how .io has been popular for a few years now.
For me this gives a result about 3 miles away from my house.
This one for me is 100 miles from my house!
And about 2 miles in a different direction from my house.
I think most people know that geo-IP is difficult, but I'm not sure it's possible to pick a "best" one as it depends on what you're testing. The real problem with all these is that there's no confidence level built in. All the coordinates are returned with 4 decimal places when in reality they're accurate to 2 decimal places at best.
So should you. I personally dislike such tools when they don't spit out the format that my eyes are already familiar with parsing.
I think you've got the "essential" tools covered as it is 👍
But what about having something like https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/ or https://www.freshworks.com/website-monitoring/is-it-down/ - checks and presents the current/live screenshot of the website, if it's online and accessible.
Just a random suggestion
but they... do?
https://db-ip.com/db/download/ip-to-city-lite
(its actually the default free database that is used/downloaded by piwik/matomo ever since maxmind have made their free database registration-only)
btw i find the dns traversal tool of your site very useful.
What about 'network·watch' ?
Geez, not too useful for the rest of us if all the results are relative to ralf's house.
Here's an idea, have a graph for pinging, and maybe screenshot creation and hosting for a few days. Kinda like ping.pe does right now https://i.ping.pe/Y/v/img_YvYIKxjz.png
You can try https://www.ip2location.io and it has free API plan with good accuracy.