DNS Detective: Open-Source AI Agent Diagnoses Domain Issues Using Live Network Probes

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A developer has built DNS Detective, a roughly 300-line Python agent that diagnoses DNS, TLS, and email-record problems by running real network probes rather than relying on pre-trained knowledge alone. The tool runs on DigitalOcean Serverless Inference using an OpenAI-compatible API and executes four probe functions — dns_lookup, tls_check, rdap_lookup, and http_check — in a loop until a evidence-backed diagnosis is reached. Unlike a standard language model that lists possible causes, the agent is constrained by a system prompt rule: it may only assert facts derived from probes it has actually run. In live tests, the agent correctly identified a null MX record causing mail bounces on example.com, a certificate expired since 2015 on a test domain, and a deliberately broken DNSSEC chain on dnssec-failed.org. The project is available on GitHub and requires only Python 3.10 and a DigitalOcean API key, with no additional infrastructure needed.

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