OpenDNS

So how many of you guys use OpenDNS?

I’ve been using the DNS servers for a while now just because they seem pretty solid, but I’ve just recently attained an account and started taking a look at the service itself. It’s quite nice.

Image from flikr.com

It’s not very useful to me, which is why I haven’t been using it, but it’s compelling as a service for an extremely large number of SOHOs and other small organizations. The one that comes to mind is schools. Anyway, here’s how it works.

1. Sign up for a FREE account and you register your network range/NAT IP with them
2. Determine within their dashboard what kinds of sites you want to block (e.g. porn, sports, social networking, etc.)
3. Point your systems to use their DNS server

A couple of minutes later you have free Internet Filtering based on those settings–as long as you continue using them as your DNS provider.

One word of caution (which should be obvious): if you’re doing this as a security measure at an elementary school or for any other unsophisticated userbase you might be ok, but in a high school or other similar environment there are going to be a number of kids who can bypass the control. All that’s required is that one changes his DNS provider (or even resolves it out of band and goes directly by IP).

Anyway, it’s an interesting service, and definitely worth messing with if you weren’t aware of it.

[ Bonus: if you use their service as described above, you can type Google queries directly into the URL bar. They will automatically query Google for you using your entered terms and return Google's output as your result. ]

Links

[ OpenDNS | opendsns.com ]