Show HN: Browse Internet Infrastructure

Show HN: Browse Internet Infrastructure(wirewiki.com)

110 points by pul 98 days ago | 21 comments

I'm launching Wirewiki.com today!

Wirewiki makes the internet’s hidden infrastructure browsable.

I quit my job 5 years ago to scale Nslookup.io. But after reaching 600k monthly users, I hit a ceiling. I couldn't naturally expand beyond DNS because of the domain name.

So I went back to the drawing board: how would I make it today? Not as a collection of tools, but as a browsable graph.

I've spent hundreds of hours and commits building that. It's not even at 10% of what I want it to be, but more than enough to be useful, and (in my biased opinion) much better than what's out there.

Wirewiki launches with DNS lookup, propagation, zone transfer and SPF checking. It also scans the entire IPv4 space for DNS servers and indexes them. I'm working on adding more data and tools.

I feel like I've developed tunnel vision, so if you see anything that feels off, let me know!

I'll keep Wirewiki open and free. Once it has a substantial amount of users, I'll open it up to sponsorship / brand integration from hosting providers, registrars and CDNs, as users will likely be in the market for those. But my goal is to keep Wirewiki free from display ads. I'm confident that's viable.

maltalex 98 days ago |

Nice website, but I feel like calling it "wire wiki" is quite ambitious. Currently, it's a (beautiful) DNS lookup tool, but that's about it. I expected something like RIPE Stat [0], or something like the undersea cable map [1] (based on the "wire" in the name). Also, if you're doing DNS, take a look at resolve.rs [2], they have some nice DNS tools, though not as pretty as yours :)

And since you mentioned scanning the IPv4 address space for DNS servers - I did that as well at a some point for a product I've built (and even have a patent on). The list of servers you're going to get with a naive scanning approach is not what you want. It won't include the servers you probably want (such as the customer-facing DNS servers of ISPs) and will include an insane amount of junk like home routers or weird IoT devices that expose their port 53. Hit me up via the email in my profile if you want to chat.

[0]: https://stat.ripe.net/

[1]: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

[2]: https://resolve.rs/

pul 98 days ago | |

You're right that it doesn't do the name Wirewiki justice yet. I've got so many things planned to add at some point, much more than just DNS. Check again in 2 years' time ;)

> The list of servers you're going to get with a naive scanning approach is not what you want.

Absolutely right. I'm doing uptime monitoring and a handful of checks (udp/tcp, nxdomain, dnssec, dns filtering) before listing them, but I feel like it could definitely be improved. Would love to talk! I'll send you an email.

AndyMcConachie 98 days ago |

Great site. If you don't mind I have feature requests, but feel free to ignore them because OSS is OSS and you shouldn't feel obligated.

1) Include a link to dnsviz.net to check on the DNSSEC status of domains. They've already done all the work and it would be a nice integration.

2) Something that I wish more DNS operators understood is the concept of shared fate between authoritative name servers. Shared fate can come in the form of same AS, same upstream, same parent domain, etc. Operators might think they have redundancy when in fact all their servers are located in the same AS, for example. If there is any way you can highlight this or show this it would be useful.

3) I didn't try looking up a phishing domain, but displaying whether a domain exists on popular block lists would be awesome.

I love your attempt at understanding all the TXT RRs that have spread across the DNS in the last 10 years. What a mess.

You're right in that this is a rabbit hole. You could spend the rest of your life building this and never actually completing it, be careful!

pul 98 days ago | |

Those are really useful suggestions, thanks!

> 1) Include a link to dnsviz.net to check on the DNSSEC status of domains.

I use DNSViz all the time. They've done a great job of displaying the entire trail and helping debug DNSSEC issues. But it's a bit too detailed for my liking. I'm thinking about how I would add this to Wirewiki. What to show and hide by default, how to format it, etc. Adding something similar is pretty high on my list for Wirewiki.

> 2) Shared fate [...]

I do already show ASNs for A/AAAA records, but adding those to NS and MX addresses as well would be useful. I'm a bit hesitant to add more data to the overview, but a separate page that shows an analysis of shared name server resources could be useful indeed. I've added it to the list.

> 3) displaying whether a domain exists on popular block lists would be awesome.

Absolutely. Already on the list :)

> You could spend the rest of your life building this and never actually completing it, be careful!

Haha, I've already spent 5 years, and I don't mind to keep going as long as it's interesting and sustainable!

thestackfox 98 days ago |

Nicely done. I poke at DNS a bit over at StackFox (https://stackfox.co/site/wirewiki.com), and anyone who’s spent time looking at DNS knows how much work goes into this.

A couple thoughts:

1) Nameserver “redundancy” that isn’t. All the ns1/ns2 setups that collapse onto the same provider or ASN once you follow the trail.

2) Authoritative drift. One server quietly serving an older serial or odd TTL for a while — invisible until something breaks. With global data, quirks like that become obvious.

Anyway, inspiring job. Wirewiki already feels like something that should have existed but somehow didn’t.

pul 98 days ago | |

You're the second person in these comments who points out faux name server redundancy. Interesting. I hadn't considered it as a major theme, but I'll move it up the list a little.

> Authoritative drift.

This is why I query all authoritative name servers (as well as delegating name servers when querying NS records) in the DNS propagation tool. I haven't seen any other site do this. This feels like such an obvious thing to me, but somehow I'm the only one.

pul 98 days ago |

Also: ask me anything.

BitsAndObjects 98 days ago | |

How do you see this positioned against something like MXToolbox? There seems to be a lot of overlap in features as it is today so I'm interested in your longer-term vision for wirewiki.

pul 98 days ago | | |

There are a ton of online DNS tool sites, MxToolbox being one of the largest.

I like the idea of evolution (diversity + selection) applied here. Many people building it differently and letting the market decide what's most useful.

My take on this space is making it a browsable graph instead of 'just' a collection of lookup tools. The internet _is_ a graph, and it often makes sense to inspect linked resources (Domain name -> name server -> IP address, for example).

As for the longer-term vision, I'd like to make this graph as complete as possible. It now only has DNS-related tools, but adding ASNs, BGP data, hosting providers, etc. would make the existing tools more useful with every addition.

tushgaurav 98 days ago | |

i remember watching your DNS course, it was very good! Do you have any other resources that you like? where i can learn internet infra, dns or anything. Thanks!!

ofrzeta 98 days ago | | |

Not they guy you asked but here's a free book https://book.systemsapproach.org (they have more free books on other topics like SDN)

pul 98 days ago | | |

Oh thanks!

Depends on how you prefer to learn, but here are a few suggestions.

I've heard good things about the Computer Networks book by Tanenbaum and Wetherall, but I haven't read it myself. Very broad and comprehensive. The most hardcore way would be to make reading RFCs your hobby. It can be tough to get through, but if you regularly take half an hour to do it, you'll learn so much. I've recently started a course at https://classes.pracnet.net/, which is good too.

chrisweekly 98 days ago | | |

HPBN -- High-Performance Browser Networking -- is an excellent (canonical?) resource: https://hpbn.co

RestartKernel 97 days ago |

Would you consider serving this as a CLI tool as well?

pul 97 days ago | |

I don't think I'll make a CLI for this any time soon.

The main thing I bring to the table with Wirewiki is UX, and I don't feel like I could do that well in a CLI.

cxr 97 days ago |

Why're "wiki"? Where wiki?

pul 97 days ago | |

It’s a wiki (loosely defined as an authoritative browsable graph / index) of everything that goes over the wire.

cxr 95 days ago | | |

That's not even close to what "wiki" means. Couldn't you have spent two seconds looking up the term that you're using (a community-owned content/knowledge graph that's "collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser") before debasing it?

You've confused "wiki" and "encyclopedia"—getting them exactly backwards. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that's a wiki.

You're creating (or, at least, aiming to create) an online encyclopedia. But it's not a wiki.

mzajc 96 days ago | | |

"Wiki" normally refers to user-editable sites, while the graph part is normally implied from being a website. Perhaps Wiregraph would be more accurate? Maybe Wireview? These kinds of networking sites are often called looking glasses, so Wireglass might also work, besides the confusion with the material.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki#Alternative_definitions

[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wiki