[HN Gopher] Show HN: Browse Internet Infrastructure
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Show HN: Browse Internet Infrastructure
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.
Author : pul
Score : 103 points
Date : 2026-02-09 12:35 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wirewiki.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wirewiki.com)
| pul wrote:
| Also: ask me anything.
| tushgaurav wrote:
| 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!!
| pul wrote:
| 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.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| 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)
| chrisweekly wrote:
| HPBN -- High-Performance Browser Networking -- is an
| excellent (canonical?) resource: https://hpbn.co
| EdNutting wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| esseph wrote:
| Have you considered that this tool is also useful to
| attackers?
| pul wrote:
| Yes. Ultimately nearly any tool can be used for good can
| also be used nefariously.
|
| Internet infrastructure data is inherently open. I'm just
| presenting it in a more useful way. So any motivated
| actor can access it regradless.
|
| In any case, exposing your IP during these lookups is bad
| operational security for them. So I would assume they'd
| prefer not to use Wirewiki.
|
| All that to say: I don't feel conflicted about making
| these tools.
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| maltalex wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| thestackfox wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| cxr wrote:
| Why're "wiki"? Where wiki?
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(page generated 2026-02-09 23:01 UTC)