I’ve been working on a few tools over the past few days. I’m personally using them whenever I create new mailboxes, move mailboxes from one server to another, create new web pages… My goal is to end up having a tool suite which provides all checks that I need in order to figure out whether the configuration of the web server, the mail server and dns server are fine.
I currently do not yet have a central page for all the tools but most of the tools have a navigation area where you can get access to the other tools. The following tools are currently available (more tools are on the way but not yet tested):
Check HTTP headers
In this tool, you can give a URL and the tool will show you the HTTP headers for this URL. It will also follow redirects and show you the headers for the redirected URLs. If you look up “https://benohead.com”, you’ll see the following:
HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Mon, 02 Sep 2013 08:38:16 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Pingback: https://benohead.com/xmlrpc.php
Location: https://benohead.com/
Cache-Control: max-age=3600
Expires: Mon, 02 Sep 2013 09:38:16 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
X-Powered-By: PleskLin
Content-Length: 0
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Mon, 02 Sep 2013 08:38:17 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Pingback: https://benohead.com/xmlrpc.php
Pragma: public
Cache-Control: max-age=0, no-cache
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Mod-Pagespeed: 1.4.26.4-3396
Content-Length: 53605
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
The first line is displayed in blue to indicate a redirect and the second one is displayed in green. If we would end up getting a 4xx or 5xx return code, it’d be shown in red.
Check SMTP server
This tool will check the DNS settings for the mail server, connect to it and perform a few checks and show you a summary as well as the log of what was done. Here’s an example when you check the domain benohead.com:
DNS MX entries for benohead.com
| Priority | Mail Server | IP Address | TTL |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | mail.benohead.com | 94.102.209.13 | 24975 |
Testing mail server: mail.benohead.com
IP address: 94.102.209.13
220 1a-8627.antagusserver.de ESMTP
>>> EHLO benohead.com
250-1a-8627.antagusserver.de
250-AUTH=LOGIN CRAM-MD5 PLAIN
250-AUTH LOGIN CRAM-MD5 PLAIN
250-STARTTLS
250-PIPELINING
250 8BITMIME
>>> STARTTLS
220 ready for tls
>>> MAIL FROM: <example@benohead.com>
250 ok
>>> RCPT TO: <example@relay.check>
553 sorry, that domain isn’t in my list of allowed rcpthosts; no valid cert for gatewaying (#5.7.1)
>>> QUIT
Summary
| Check | Results | |
|---|---|---|
 |
Reverse lookup of SMTP Banner | 1A-7583.antagus.de – 1a-8627.antagusserver.de |
 |
SMTP Reverse DNS Mismatch | 1a-8627.antagusserver.de – 1a-8627.antagusserver.de |
|
TLS Support | Supported |
|
TLS Start | Successful |
|
Switch to TLS communication | Successful |
|
Open relay | Not an open relay |
I’ll also add in the future a description of what exactly needs to be fixed when something is marked as not OK but I guess it’s a good start (and it’s already enough for me since I know how to fix it ;-)).
Blacklist check
This tool will check whether the specified domain name or IP address is contained in anti-spam databases. This check will take much longer than the other ones since it will check 67 anti-spam databases. This tool uses Ajax to check multiple black lists in parallel for better performance. It checks for black list entries at over 60 anti-spam databases.
The information displayed should be pretty self-explanatory so I won’t go into details in this post.
Whois
This tool is basically just an online version of the whois tool you know from the command line. It will show the domain registration information for the specified IP address or a host name.
The information displayed should be pretty self-explanatory so I won’t go into details in this post.
Check Alexa Rank
This tool uses the script described in my previous post: PHP: Displaying the Alexa ranking of a web sit. If you enter benohead.com as domain, you’ll get something like this:
Alexa Rank: 444,068
Number of links: 67
HTML Escape Tool
The HTML Escape Tool is already described in this post. So I won’t add anything to that.
Other tools
I’m currently working on the following tools which will hopefully be online within the next weeks:
- An HTML code cleaner to make sure that all tags are properly closed, indented and capitalized.
- A check for all DNS entries for a specified domain.
I guess I’ll have other ideas as I finish implementing these tools.
If you encounter any problem working with any of the tools please drop me a line.
Hi I have used you tools and really its very helpful tools for seo peoples. But it will become more user friendly if you add multiple link option in your software.
There are a couple of things I plan to improve in the tools:
Let’s see when I find time to implement these.