Developer resources

Welcome to /dev, our resource area for Web developers and netheads.

All tools and information on this site are provided "as is", and carry absolutely no warranty whatsoever!

Zen Solutions accepts no responsibility for any effects, defects, failures or inaccuracies.

That said, if you do find any problems, please contact us and give us your feedback.

FYI, your IP address is 18.97.9.170



What's new?

I've added a couple of new tools to the collection recently.

IP address analyser

Not as exciting as it sounds - just shows the class of a basic IP v4 address, plus the integer network number and host IDs for those once-in-a-blue-moon occasions when you really, really need that.

Base64 encode/decode

Does what it says on the tin.

OpenSSL and SSH keys

Generating RSA key pairs is a lot harder than it should be. On a Linux console, it's relatively straightforward but requires a "recipe" list of OpenSSL commands which are anything but and which I keep forgetting :/ For folk doomed to only use Windows, it's close to impossible. So, here's a simple key generator page!

Also, we had a need recently to convert an existing PEM-format public key into the equivalent format required by SSH for its access list; that proved rather trickier than you'd expect, and I ended up creating a (hopefully!) foolproof converter - maybe this can save some other poor soul turning their brain inside out too...

Data URI generator

We had a need to convert some binary files into data:-format URI strings recently, so as usual I ended up writing a little tool to do the job rather than fudge it yet again!

MX tester

This does some basic DNS checks on an email address then, if it finds an MX record, tries to send a test message to the recipient and displays the dialog which results. I needed a tool to make SMTP testing and diagnostics easier, so wrote this; I'm slightly dubious about making something like this public in case of misuse (I don't really want to get this server blacklisted) but it is CAPTCHA protected to prevent 'bots forcing it, so in the spirit of open access stupidity I'll leave it avaliable and see how we go...

UPDATE - This is currently broken as I've never got around to updating the code to properly handle TLS. Still does basic checks and returns the mailservers though, so still good for something :)