An intro to one of my favorite Internet tools
In the Internet industry, IP addresses are very much like postal addresses. They identify your location and your neighborhood. Internet tools that query IP addresses can produce a ton of information about who you are and who you're associated with. For instance, Internet tools can tell if you're blacklisted, display WHOIS information showing administrative and technical contacts, show upstream providers, and if you have a website, when that domain was created and when it's due to expire.

One of my favorite Internet tools is Robtex.
Robtex is known as the Swiss army knife Internet tool because its so versatile. When you open Robtex, the first thing you'll notice is that it displays your IP address with tons of information related to it like:

RBL and DNS checks
DNS reverse and forwards
Your entire c-network
WHOIS lookup information for a domain
Route checks
AS numbers
BGP announcements
AS macros
RFC documents
DMOZ

And it will display the same information for any IP or domain, so if you want to query backbone connections for any provider, you can simply enter that providers domain name and instantly see their upstream. Across the top navigation bar, you'll see tabs for Summary, Records, Graph, Shared, Whois, Blacklists, Analysis and Contact. Want to know host names sharing an IP with A records - it's there. Or domains using this as name server under another name - there again. Is your IP blacklisted? Check and keep your fingers crossed the links are all green (a good thing).

I'm interested to see what your favorite Internet tools are and why?

I noticed that you have been pointing some links to Robtex from time to time, in an effort to help some members extract some of the information about their host/network. However, I never quite fully understood the system - perhaps because of its complexity and/or some of the scripts/commands that are totally new to me.

I definitely have to do a lot more technical reading to educate myself how Robtex can help me personally. Thanks for the wonderful intro to it though.

I've been using Robtex for some time now. And lately they've added some additional info, like organic competitors and the keywords you share with them. Good stuff.

Thanks. Always interested in such tools.

I also use http://network-tools.com/

And for DNS, my fav by far is http://intodns.com/

I use iptools. It shows almost all info we needed. And its free.