Public Route Servers
& Looking Glass Sites

About the Directory

Route servers and looking glass sites worldwide

RouteServer.org maintains a curated list of public route servers and looking glass sites spanning North America (ARIN), South America (LACNIC), Asia (APNIC), Europe (RIPE), and Africa (AFRINIC). Network engineers and operators use these servers to inspect BGP routing tables, run traceroutes, and diagnose reachability issues across the global internet.

The site also provides quick access to regional WHOIS lookup services — ARIN, LACNIC, APNIC, RIPE, and AFRINIC — along with a catalog of free network and security tools.

Public route servers provide a transparent window into the internet's backbone, allowing anyone to query live BGP routing tables and observe how traffic flows between autonomous systems. By telnetting into these open servers, network engineers can inspect prefixes, examine path selections, and verify how routes propagate across different providers and geographic regions without needing privileged access to any single network.

Looking glass sites complement route servers by offering a web-based interface for running common diagnostic commands such as ping, traceroute, and BGP route lookups from a provider's perspective. These tools let operators see exactly how a remote network views their prefixes, making it easier to identify asymmetric routing, peering issues, or reachability problems that might otherwise remain hidden from their own vantage point.

The directory spans every major regional internet registry territory, from ARIN in North America to RIPE in Europe, APNIC across Asia-Pacific, LACNIC in Latin America and the Caribbean, and AFRINIC covering the African continent. This global distribution ensures that users can find a nearby or topologically relevant server when they need to isolate a routing issue or validate a configuration change.

Traceroute remains one of the most fundamental network debugging tools available, mapping each hop a packet takes from source to destination. When run through a remote looking glass, traceroute reveals the forward path from that provider toward a target, which is invaluable for understanding where latency spikes appear or where packet loss begins along an internet path that crosses multiple carrier boundaries.

Border Gateway Protocol is the glue that holds the modern internet together, exchanging reachability information between tens of thousands of autonomous systems. Understanding BGP behaviour through public route servers helps engineers learn how path attributes like local preference, AS path length, and multi-exit discriminators influence the final forwarding decision for any given destination prefix.

Regional WHOIS lookup services play a complementary role in network operations by mapping IP address blocks and autonomous system numbers to the organizations that manage them. When combined with route server data, WHOIS information helps operators determine who to contact for peering arrangements, abuse reports, or troubleshooting sessions when a routing anomaly crosses administrative boundaries.

Free network and security tools gathered in one place give operators a convenient starting point for everyday tasks ranging from DNS diagnostics and reverse lookups to SSL certificate validation and port scanning. Having these utilities organized alongside route servers and looking glass access means less time spent searching for resources and more time spent resolving actual network issues.

Building familiarity with public route servers benefits both seasoned engineers and those new to internet routing. The ability to compare BGP views from multiple providers around the world, trace paths across oceans and continents, and validate routing policies against real-world behaviour turns abstract networking concepts into practical, observable reality.