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I want to check a particular website from various locations. For example, I see a site example.com from the US and it works fine. The colleague in Europe says he cannot see the site (gets a dns eror).

Is there any way I can check that for my self instead of asking him every time?

Vadim Kotov
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schar
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7 Answers7

90

This is a bit of self promotion, but I built a tool to do just this that you might find useful, called GeoPeeker.

It remotely accesses a site from servers spread around the world, renders the page with webkit and sends back an image. It will also report the IP address and DNS information of the site as it appears from that location.

There are no ads, and it's very stream-lined to serve this one purpose. It's still in development, and feedback is welcome. Here's hoping somebody besides myself finds it useful!

lewsid
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  • Interesting. I'd suggest posting else where so that this gets more visibility like reddit.com/r/software – schar Jun 18 '13 at 17:57
  • Thanks for the suggestion. I'm just buttoning a few things up and adding a feedback form before I feed it to Reddit. – lewsid Jun 19 '13 at 16:50
  • @lewid It would be nice to see latency timings as well as the screenshot – Mike Atlas Oct 11 '13 at 22:49
  • @MikeAtlas Thanks for the feedback, and please keep it coming. This, and other new features are soon going to be added to the current version, and a new premium version is also in the works that will add even more goodies. – lewsid Oct 15 '13 at 20:47
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    I dont think geopeeker works. It loads a white image on all six locations. And there is no IP address either. – Oxon Jan 03 '14 at 18:03
  • It works, though at the time of your writing it was being overwhelmed by bots that maxed out the storage for images on each node. If you run into any other trouble, please hit me up via the contact page or @geopeeker on twitter! – lewsid Jan 17 '14 at 19:04
  • Good work @lewsid, but tested with different sites..it open some of them..n for some of it show blank white page...any suggestion/improvement ? – CoDe Mar 05 '14 at 07:57
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    @Shubh There is a recurring memory leak on each of my render nodes that is to blame for this issue. I've deployed a patch that I hope should improve performance. Thanks for the feedback! – lewsid Mar 12 '14 at 16:07
  • This has been the most promising tool unfortunately the content I wanted to verify was below the fold and it doesn't support scrolling (as far as I could tell) – JaredMcAteer Dec 08 '14 at 21:18
  • Each thumbnail image GeoPeeker renders is scrollable and clickable to deliver a larger (and longer) version. – lewsid Dec 09 '14 at 00:33
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    1.5 year after the post, the website is still there and is working really great! – Charles P. Dec 24 '14 at 11:18
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Sometimes a website doesn't work on my PC and I want to know if it's the website or a problem local to me(e.g. my ISP, my router, etc).

The simplest way to check a website and avoid using your local network resources(and thus avoid any problems caused by them) is using a web proxy such as Proxy.org.

Diaa Sami
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Well, DNS should be the same worldwide, wouldn't it? Of course it can take up to a day or so until your new DNS record is propagated around the world. So either something is wrong on your colleague's end or the DNS record still takes some time...

I usually use online DNS lookup tools for that, e.g. http://network-tools.com/

It can check your HTTP header as well. Only a proxy located in Europe would be better.

chris166
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1

Besides using multiple proxies or proxy-networks, you might want to try the planet-lab. (And probably there are other similar institutions around).

The social solution would be to post a question on some board that you are searching for volunteers that proxy your requests. (They only have to allow for one destination in their proxy config thus the danger of becoming spam-whores is relatively low.) You should prepare credentials that ensure your partners of the authenticity of the claim that the destination is indeed your computer.

Don Johe
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  • Is that similar to the [RIPE Atlas](https://atlas.ripe.net/)? I volunteer a probe to RIPE and I'm very happy about it. :) – Nemo May 03 '15 at 09:23
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DNS info is cached at many places. If you have a server in Europe you may want to try to proxy through it

Bostone
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  • DroidIn - We use godaddy.com to host and it is not a dedicated IP. we see other websites using godaddy.com's same name server to be working fine. Is there a website that can simulate the http request? – schar Jul 13 '09 at 18:55
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It depends on wether the locatoin is detected by different DNS resolution from different locations, or by IP address that you are browsing from.

If its by DNS, you could just modify your hosts file to point at the server used in europe. Get your friend to ping the address, to see if its different from the one yours resolves to.

To browse from a different IP address:

You can rent a VPS server. You can use putty / SSH to act as a proxy. I use this from time to time to brows from the US using a VPS server I rent in the US.

Having an account on a remote host may or may not be enough. Sadly, my dreamhost account, even though I have ssh access, does not allow proxying.

Matthias Wandel
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The only thing that springs to mind for this is to use a proxy server based in Europe. Either have your colleague set one up [if possible] or find a free proxy. A quick Google search came up with http://www.anonymousinet.com/ as the top result.

Etzeitet
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