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How OrbitProbe works

OrbitProbe reads the same public sources a careful engineer would check by hand, at the moment you ask, and tells you where each answer came from.

  1. Registration data comes from RDAP

    For each domain, OrbitProbe uses the IANA bootstrap registry to find the RDAP server responsible for the top-level domain and requests the record over HTTPS. Registrar, dates, status codes, nameservers and DNSSEC state are taken from that response as published. Fields that the registry or registrar redacts stay redacted.

  2. DNS is queried through public resolvers

    DNS records are requested from well-known public recursive resolvers. You see the values and TTLs those resolvers return, which is what most of the internet sees. Because resolvers cache, an answer can be as old as its TTL; the observation time is shown so that this is never hidden.

  3. Mail configuration is read, not tested

    MX, SPF and DMARC records are fetched from DNS and parsed against the relevant standards to flag common mistakes. OrbitProbe does not connect to mail servers or send messages, and DKIM is only checked when a selector is known.

  4. Hosting is mapped from IP to network

    Each resolved address is matched to the autonomous system that announces it, along with the routed prefix, network name and the allocation country of the block. Addresses in known CDN and proxy ranges are labelled as edge addresses, because they are not the origin server.

  5. Web and TLS come from one ordinary request

    OrbitProbe makes a single HTTPS request to the hostname, follows a small number of redirects and records the status, selected response headers and the certificate presented during the TLS handshake. Requests to private, local or internal addresses are refused.

What OrbitProbe does not do
  • It does not reveal redacted registrant data or identify the person behind a domain.
  • It does not list all records or subdomains of a zone; it answers for the names it queries.
  • It does not locate origin servers behind CDNs, and an allocation country is not a server location.
  • It does not measure DNS propagation as a percentage; it shows current answers and their TTLs.
  • It does not prove that email will reach the inbox; it checks that published records are coherent.
  • It does not certify that a website is safe; a valid certificate means encrypted transport to that name only.
  • Some country-code extensions have no public RDAP service, so registration data may be unavailable for them.