Make Your Network Safer And More Reliable

(Just about) every time you go to do anything on the Internet, be it check your email, visit a website or whatever, your network has to submit a DNS request to find out the target machine(s) to communicate with. So a lot of your Internet performance and security is effected by the DNS servers you use. By default, most everyone uses their ISP’s servers, but you might want to consider using the free OpenDNS service instead.

OpenDNS offers many features (such as content filtering and phishing protection) and is easy to set up. Additionally, depending on your ISP, you can see noticeable speed increases (due to faster DNS query responses). Best of all, OpenDNS has virtually zero downtime so you will not be impacted if your ISP has a DNS outage.

I plan on both implementing OpenDNS both at home and in our office in the very near future.

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SAP
The only down-side to the default OpenDNS is that it resolves all host names, even ones which should not exist, such as
test.invalid
Mostly this does not matter, but for testing networking failures it can be a real nuisance.
With a free account one can change the settings so that OpenDNS no longer resolves missing host names. [However this should not be necessary for the .invalid TLD]
http://bpcablog.blogspot.com/ sefcug
I implemented OpenDNS about six months ago on my home network, and immediately noticed an uptick in performance.
Unfortunately, I am blocked from doing anything at work, or I would have done the same there.
I am definitely not an expert, but not a novice either, and the process of setting things up with OpenDNS went smoothly and quickly.
Floyd Bufkin
I’ve been using OpenDNS for years and it works great. Another little trick, is to ping those sites your visit frequently and have bookmarked, and change the address in the bookmark to us the IP for the site instead. Then when you click on your bookmark, it goes directly to the site instead of having to be resolved by a DNS server. You can also edit your hosts file to do the same thing.

David K.
Great idea…until/unless the site’s IP changes, that is. Hence, the whole reason for DNS in the first place…

Steve Stone
I tried opendns a few years ago. It was great for home use. It caused problems with my home office VPN connection, telling me internal business VPN IP’s did not exist. I won’t even begin to pretend to know why a VPN connection would still look to the default dns config to decode a business’s internal IP addresses.. but it did with the default VPN config I am directed to use.
peekaboo
So OpenDNS records every single website that I’ve visited?