Tom Merritt and Veronica Belmont from CNET Buzz Out Loud took a few minutes on Monday to talk about OpenDNS.
Listen to the brief clip about OpenDNS (3 minutes, 10 seconds long; 1.5MB).
Thank you to Tom and CNET for permission to host the clip, which was pulled from the Buzz Out Loud show for July 10, 2006. They make tech pretty fun every day.
In the clip, Tom does a good job succinctly explaining what DNS is before talking about the service more broadly, rightly saying that it’s a pretty easy switch to make. Tom tried it personally, and both of them liked the idea (listen for yourself).
Tom and Veronica also discuss how OpenDNS interacts with corporate networks, and that’s something we should explain more.
Internal resources — for example, a web tool you might use for reporting vacation days — often takes advantage of local DNS resolution. In that case, using OpenDNS may prevent you from getting to those resources and you will have to turn off OpenDNS while you use them. There is no logical way for us to address internal resources, yet. On a related note, if on a VPN to a corporate network not using OpenDNS, you will be using the corporate DNS server, rather than OpenDNS, until you leave the VPN.
Of course, we encourage network admins to use OpenDNS as a forwarder, where internal requests are handled internally, and external requests are handled by OpenDNS. Happy to provide more details and help to anyone interested.
Scott Fitchet
I followed the instructions. It didn’t work.
I had to disable, then enable my local connection as well. Now it works.
Good luck!
(linksys wireless-g)
posted on July 12th, 2006 at 5:57 pm
cassandrakuno
this is a good development…
hope it will become the new trend…
posted on July 12th, 2006 at 10:29 pm
David Szpunar
In regards to changing DNS servers on company computers, your instructions may wish to make clear that changing the DNS on corporate computers by non-IT staff shouldn’t be done without permission due to many corporate networks (including any running Active Directory domains) requiring workstations to point to domain-based DNS servers for proper resolution (all kinds of problems including really long waits for computers to log in and many other issues can crop up if the workstations are set to DNS servers that don’t know about the corporate internal servers, I’ve seen this!).
Using OpenDNS as fowarders on the corporate DNS servers for recursive queries should be fine (I’m doing that), except for an issue on your website mentioned about using OpenDNS for mailservers that do RBL checks, which I don’t understand completely but I have a hunch it’s related to OpenDNS not returning not-found errors and instead returning your IP with search results for unknown hosts, which RBLs rely on if I remember correctly.
posted on July 13th, 2006 at 6:58 am
Jacob Levy
Here’s an idea: collaborate with Firefox so that it comes with its own dns lookup implementation that uses your service.
posted on July 13th, 2006 at 8:51 am
Joshua Henderson
Ya. I heard this on Buzz Out Loud. It is great :).
posted on July 13th, 2006 at 9:07 pm