Today we made it official - our library of handy DNS and email troubleshooting tools on DNSstuff.com are now free! You can use the tools a few times before being prompted to create an account, with an account you can create your own favorites and arrange the tools as you see fit. The DNSstuff Toolbox ("Professional Toolset") has dozens of tools for testing/retrieving DNS records and troubleshooting configuration issues that might affect network connectivity, routing, DNS and email; the Mail Server Test Center consolidates a few critical tests that might affect email into one place.
Questions DNSstuff Tools can Help you Answer
Is it down for everyone or just me? Can people reach my site? Is my site slower from different parts of the internet?
DNSstuff is a great third party external resource that lets you troubleshoot remote connectivity issues without calling all your friends to ask them to try accessing your site and tell you how slow it is. In addition to the usual traceroute, our vector trace tool lets you drop in an IP and we'll connect to it from 2 different locations to see whether there's any issues with your site that might differ based on someone's location. While you're there, dig into the details about any hop to find out more about who owns it and where it is.
Are my DNS records good? Has my DNS change propagated through the internet yet? I am setting up a new site or working with a new customer and how can I tell their DNS is configured correctly? Is there a problem with one of my listed DNS servers not responding?
Nothing's more fun than making changes or making a new site live and having someone ask you every 5 minutes why the traffic isn't coming yet, or why people are still seeing the old site. Okay, maybe more fun than that is when you have random reports of lookup failures or communication errors to your site and have no idea why - but all of the network connectivity itself seems good. You can use DNSstuff to do tests against your DNS records and their listed DNS servers to make sure all of the listings are correct AND help you identify common problems or pitfalls with DNS that might lead to these types of failures.
Our DNSreport tool will run a number of tests against your domain and subsequent listed DNS servers to tell you if there's a problem anywhere down the line. You can also use the ISP cached DNS lookup tool to see if ISPs have cached your records or are showing the new ones.
Where is this IP address physically located? How does traffic route through different geographic areas to get to one of my sites? Could a wonky route that sends traffic overseas be making my site particularly slow?
DNSstuff has a few IP location and visual traceroute tools that help you identify where a certain IP is located and what routes traffic might be taking to get to an IP address. The vector trace (sample above) is handy to see how different locations might be reaching you. Our standard traceroute performs the exact same lookup but from a single host. IP information will look up all of the info related to an IP (including location across several location tools) and there's always standard IPWhois to do a simple reverse ownership lookup.
Am I listed on any spam blacklists?
There's a bunch of spam blacklists out there and getting listed means email from you might not reach someone using a blacklist to prevent unwanted email. DNSstuff has a blacklist lookup tool that checks your IP address against those lists. You can also check a domain against a URI blacklist tool in case your domain has appeared in spam and that's causing you to be blocked, too. If you are blocked, we've lined up the contact info so you can react accordingly.
Who owns this site and which whois service should I use to find out if I need to contact them? I changed my whois record info, but how do I know it's done?
There are several online whois tools, but usually in order to use them, you have to at least figure out which whois service to go to. We've hooked them all up to one lookup tool so you can drop in an IP or domain name and see who it belongs to (and all the other useful whois info). We also have snapshots so you can see when whois information last changed and what changed.
People are getting bounce messages from our email, but not all of the time, and I can't figure out what's going on - help?
If you've got multiple servers configured as your MX, mail can find its way to all of them - but only sometimes, which makes problems pretty hard to track down unless you check every server. Mail Server Test Center runs a bunch of tests that check basic connectivity, records, SPF, and other info against ALL of your MX records.
And More!!
There's a ton of other tools on DNSstuff - everything from a Speed Test to DKIM Key/SPF record checking to a CIDR calculator and even social media search. DNSstuff is also here on Thwack, over in the DNSstuff space where our product management and sometimes even dev team checks in to see how we can help.
NOTE: All paying DNSstuff customers continue to have access to the same tools and information that they did before, and access to create an online case with our support team up to the expiration date of your account. As your account expires, your access to any tools won't change and you'll experience no interruption in service.