Building your own looking glass for $5/month

Fun little project I threw together last month. Wanted ping/mtr/trace from a few vantage points without paying $20/month for some hosted looking glass.

Grabbed a 512MB NAT VPS from OVHcloud for €5/mo (IPv6 + 20 IPv4 ports). Threw on debian, bird2, and a tiny flask app. It actually works.

# lg.py (trimmed)
@app.route("/ping/<target>")
def do_ping(target):
    return subprocess.check_output(
        ["ping", "-c", "5", "-i", "0.2", target],
        text=True
    )

Bird2 announces a /48 I split from my Vultr tunnel. Upstream sees me at two pops now. Total build time: maybe 3 hours with coffee breaks.

Currently supports ping, mtr, traceroute, and a basic bgp summary. Thinking about adding lg.sh-style shareable links next.

Lol this is exactly the kind of thing I used to cobble together on my old Hostinger reseller account back when I thought I needed to see everything myself never got past bash scripts though yours looks way cleaner How do you handle the subprocess safety on that thing or do you just trust your users not to ping 127.0.0.1

Got lucky on this one. OVHcloud had those €5 NAT plans at €4/MO ARE YOU KIDDING during their march sale I grabbed three in different DCs, flipped two into wireguard endpoints, kept one for... basically this exact thing. Price history on these is WILD. Used to be $3/mo in 2024, then they "deprecated" the line, now it's back with less RAM but same port allocation.

Your bird2 config: are you doing full tables or just a default? Full tables on 512MB sounds spicy