Update: We’ve gotten great response from D-Link and Actiontec customers. No need to send anymore. Still waiting on confirmation about Blackberry.

We realize there are lots of popular (and not-so-popular) routers and modems we don’t have instructions for on our site. But it’s hard writing instructions for a device you don’t have in front of you. That’s why we’re calling on you to help us build out our Get Started library. At the top of our wish list are instructions for these models:

* D-Link DGL-4300
* D-Link DI-604
* Actiontec GT701
* Actiontec GT704

Inititally we thought we could write instructions based on user manuals. We found the manuals, but they didn’t provide enough information to teach others how to change DNS settings.

This just in: For Verizon users and others, we added instructions for the very popular Westell 327w today.

If you are so kind as to help us (and other OpenDNS users who share in your router or modem taste) out with instructions, please send a few bulleted steps based on any of the instructions we already have. Screenshots to accompany the steps would be great, too. Anyone who sends in accurate instructions will get a shout-out on our Web site and will forever be known as the helpful author of the [insert your router/modem model here] instructions.

Don’t worry about perfection. At this point anything will help us. And, of course, it’s our job to polish up the instructions and make them look pretty for the site.

There is also the possibility that some routers/modems don’t allow users to change DNS settings. That information is as helpful, if not more, than instructions.

Just send an e-mail with the instructions and screenshots, or other feedback, to contact at opendns dot com.

Oh, and if you have a Blackberry and can verify that these instructions work, we’d really appreciate it.

1. Go to Start->Network Connections->Show All Connections
2. Right-click your BlackBerry Internet icon, select Properties.
3. A window will open. Click the Server Types tab.
4. Click TCP/IP Settings.
5. Select “Use the following DNS server addresses:”
6. Enter 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.

I’ll be in St. Louis, MO for the beginning of next week and would love to meet up with some of you.

Sunday, Monday and Tuesday I will be attending NANOG 38. NANOG is the North American Network Operators Group and is a great place to stay current with cool stuff in the systems, networking and operations fields. The meeting also coincides with ARIN’s meeting. ARIN, if you don’t already know, is the group that manages IP address allocations and assignments for North America. It manages the policy that its members (ISPs and networks mostly) fall under when requesting and managing IP space. It’s a great group that masterfully handles what seems like an easy task but is actually quite complicated.

If you want to try and meet while I’m in town just shoot me an email or reply below. I’ll be staying at the Knight Center at my Alma Mater, Washington University in St. Louis (also a NANOG sponsor). It’s not far from where the conference is and it keeps me near Clayton and University City, two of my favorite St. Louis neighborhoods.

PhishTank is alive, and filling up.

PhishTank is a community anti-phishing Web site where anyone can go to submit suspected phishes, track the status of their submissions and help verify others’ submissions. Unlike other anti-phishing efforts that may come to mind, PhishTank is totally free to use and open to access.

After a qualified number of users collectively agree that a suspected phish is, in fact, a real phish, the phish becomes verified. (Amit drew the Digg parallel.)

But we didn’t stop there. Because we genuinely want to stop phishing and believe firmly that phishing data should not cost money, PhishTank has a free and open API. Our hope is that developers will use PhishTank data to build anti-phishing elements into their tools.

And you’ve probably guessed by now how OpenDNS uses PhishTank data. Once the PhishTank community collectively verifies a phish, we conduct an additional layer of checks and balances and ultimately block the phish for OpenDNS users (if the users have phishing protection enabled, of course). We still get phishing data from other sources, too, but we think you’re going to help make PhishTank our best source.

We want OpenDNS to be the best it can possibly be, and in order for that to happen we need the best phishing data available. But we’re not selfish — the data belongs to all of us.

Read more about PhishTank here and let us know what you think!