Looking.House - more than 150 points of Looking Glass on one site

Almost from the very beginning of the VPS Search, there was a section with Looking Glass points on it. I wrote about it in January 2014 and at that time there were 23 points on the map. The functional was rather scarce, the points periodically “died”, and there was no time to follow them. Plus, for a long time already there is a script for organizing your Looking Glass point, which is used by many hosters. However, this script has 2 drawbacks: firstly, hosters need to independently install it on the server (yes, this is also a disadvantage), and secondly, there is no centralized base in which information is collected about all points from different hosters. This year I decided to take up this section, and as a result I got a website, which I haven’t seen any analogues of, and I would like to present the project LOOKING.HOUSE with pleasure.



I just want to note that I decided to do this site in English so that it would be useful not only for Russian-speaking users, moreover, there is practically no text on it, so even a minimum level of English will not be an obstacle to its use.

At the moment, 156 outlets from 85 hosters in 40 countries have been added to the site. On the main page you can see the map with points on it. If we know the exact address of the data center, then we mark it on the map, otherwise we indicate the point in the city where the server is located. If you click on a point, you can see its location and, if this information is provided to us, the name of the data center. Below you can see a list of countries that allows you to view available points in a particular country.
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To add a point to a hoster, you only need to tell us about your desire and provide a virtual server, and we will do the rest of the work ourselves. On the IP addresses of the points there is a simplified version (in terms of design, but not functionality) of the script, which the hoster can use on its website as a frame or link. Thus, 2 problems are solved at once: the hoster does not need to do anything, and we can make a map with all the points.



From a technical point of view, each point is a virtual server with minimal characteristics (as a rule, 256-512 MB RAM, 5-20 GB HDD, 1 processor core). These characteristics are more than enough to work, since apart from nginx to check the download speed on the server, no additional software is installed.



On the point page you can see detailed information about it: the hoster who provided it, a map with a location, IP and IPv6 (if supported) addresses, the ability to download 10/100/1000 MB files for checking speed and network functions: host, ping, ping6, traceroute, traceroute6, mtr, mtr6.



The user can perform each function separately or immediately put the entire list to run. I’ll say right away that there are several non-critical errors, for example, no one will swear when the user tries to execute the ping6 function for an IPv4 address. For convenience, the ping result is parsed, and statistics are available to the user in a more convenient way.

This version of the site is still quite raw, so it lacks some features that I plan to add in the future. From ideas I can report the following:

• the ability to specify various keys to perform functions;
• the ability to perform one function at once from several points;
• the ability to check the speed of uploading files to the server;
• the ability to check the speed directly from the browser;
• personal account for saving statistics on command execution;
• display statistics for each of the points for a long period.

Despite the fact that at the moment the site has already added more than 150 points, we will always welcome new hosts and their points. We make the configuration of virtual servers completely independently, the minimum server characteristics for a point: 256 MB of RAM, 5 GB of a disk, a dedicated IPv4 address, the presence of root access to the server.

Also, users can access the information about the IP address and the list of DNS domain records .





I would be happy to hear feedback and suggestions for new features.

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