I lost count of how many times I’ve Googled “dns lookup” and landed on a page with three popup ads, a cookie banner, and a tool that runs the query on somebody’s server I know nothing about. So this week I built the thing I kept wishing existed: a Network Tools section where every lookup runs live, in your browser, with no middleman.
Four tools launched with it:
The “no ping” question
The most common ask for a tools site like this is ping and traceroute — and you’ll notice they’re not here, on purpose. Browsers physically cannot send raw ICMP packets. Any site that shows you a “ping” is running it on their own servers and showing you the result. That’s not a crime, but it means your query goes through their infrastructure, gets logged on their end, and can be rate-limited or weaponized as a DDoS relay. I’d rather tell you why the tool is missing than fake it.
What “runs in your browser” actually buys you
Everything here talks straight to public APIs — Google and Cloudflare’s DNS-over-HTTPS endpoints, the registry’s own RDAP service — from your device. There’s no backend relay of mine in the path. That means faster results, no query history on my side, and nothing to sign up for. The same promise every tool on this site makes.
More network tools are already on the bench. If there’s one you wish existed, tell me — the backlog is built on exactly that kind of grumbling.