Useful web lookup sites (tummy.com, ltd. Journal Entry)
tummy.com: we do linux

Wednesday December 01, 2004 at 16:14
Subject: Useful web lookup sites
Keywords: Information, Web
Posted by: Kevin Fenzi

Here's a few sites that have handy tools to look up various useful things.

No such list would be complete without google, but everyone should already be using google pretty regularly. I wanted to mention some sites that let you look up things that people may not know about:

The dnsreport.com site is super useful for tracking down DNS issues. How well do your domains do? A dnsreport for a domain is especially nice for sending to people who may not know DNS setup all that well, because it lists the problem and what causes it.

A good site to check and see if your mail server has somehow gotten listed on one of the RBLs (Realtime Blackhole List) for email blocking is: http://openrbl.org/. This one site will check for your name/IP in a bunch of lists and show you links to those lists if you need to try and get removed from them.

Despite how good a job http://froogle.google.com does for searching for specific items and getting a good price, I like to scan http://www.techbargains.com/ for good tech deals. They often have some deal on something you didn't even know existed.

If you are looking for fedora rpms, http://fedoratracker.org/ can be a pretty nice search engine.
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Author: Sean Reifschneider
Subject: These are a few of my favorite websites.
Good idea for an entry. Here are a few of my favorite sites:
  • As Kevin says, Google. I've been using Google since 1995, it just rocks. However, don't forget that they have a Linux-oriented sub-site at http://google.com/linux
  • The Python Package Index and the Vaults of Parnassus are good place to go to look for Python things. The Vaults could be better about listing fresh things, but it's a start.
  • Freshmeat doesn't have the best search algorithms. For example, searching for a package by it's exact name often results in that package being burried under a bunch of other packages. Sourceforge has the same problem. However, they do have a very good classification system and track projects by how popular they are and how recently updated.
  • rpm.pbone.net is probably my favorite place to search for RPM packages. They have a pretty comprehensive collection of package information from many sources. It's very much like what FileWatcher used to be before it went off-line, but dedicated to RPM packages.

Sean