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aToad #10: online DNS checkers

Just a few sites that let you very easily check on your DNS records:

whatsmydns.net: this one doesn’t give a lot of details (very few, actually, only the resolving IP of a specific domain or subdomain), but gives the results as seen from several (at the moment 20) locations all around the world. So this is great to see if your DNS record is properly propagated everywhere.

intoDNS.com and Pingability.com: on the contrary, those run from only one location (at least one at a time), but they perform a deep analysis of all your DNS record, check for inadequate settings, and offer advice to improve those, if needed. So this is great to diagnose a misconfigured DNS record, once you’ve made sure it propagated. Pingability even does some checking to make sure your e-mail server isn’t configured as an open relay.

Update (2016-09-16)

I had forgotten about this post, so when I did my latest migration last week I found a couple of new ones:

Zonemaster: kind of similar to intoDNS in my opinion, except that as far as I know it’s the only one in my list that will check both TCP and UDP on your DNS server. So it’s the only one that caught that my current DNS server is actually not reachable via TCP (maybe this explains why I couldn’t get AXFR requests to work on this one, while it worked fine with a seemingly identical configuration on my previous server). It also is the only one in my list that does test AXFR requests directly.

DNS Health @ Pingdom: just another one, which doesn’t give much details and keep its results in a cache you can’t empty, so you can’t repeat the test quickly to test your modifications. However, a noticeable thing about it is that you can use it to test an undelegated domain name.

Posted in A Tool A Day, web development.


2 Responses

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  1. Adam Levine says

    Thanks, for sharing the important online tools for DNS
    Your link for zonemaster is not working. Please check it out.
    Here I would like to recommend a tool, that provides multiple DNS and IP related tools under one domain https://dnschecker.org/, the best part is that tool has over 100+ Pubic DNS Servers available in General and Country listings to check Live DNS Propagation results. With that, it includes other tools like Domain DNS Health Check, WhatsMyIP, IP Geo Location, Email Headers, IP Blacklist Checker, MX Check, and other important SEO tools as well.

    • patheticcockroach says

      I kept the comment in my todo list but still haven’t found the time to update the post, so I thought it had been way too long already and I’ll just publish it and update the post maybe some day in the distant future…

      As for the zonemaster link being broken, yeah I should have seen it coming that they don’t keep test results forever, this I just fixed



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