Hooray! It’s finally here!

We’ve been celebrating all month long, but today is the official SysAdmin Appreciation Day.

The last challenge of the month was to tell us about your proudest SysAdmin moment, a time when you were the hero. We had some great submissions, but our winning story tugs at the heartstrings and really speaks to what SysAdmin Day is all about.

Winner Patrick Farley is the SysAdmin for Florida Drug Screening Inc., “a national provider of drug testing and alcohol testing and specimen collection services; including DOT, FAA testing, Drug Free Workplace policy development, education, instant on site drug testing devices and At-Home drug testing.” He tells of a week when he was flying SysAdmin solo, and got slammed with a series of unavoidable issues. He overcame all, and in the end got the recognition he deserves.

Happy SysAdmin Day to Patrick and all other SysAdmins. Today is your day, so enjoy it.

-Team OpenDNS

PS. Some of you asked us to give your boss a gentle reminder about SysAdmin Appreciation Day, which we did gladly.

In Patrick’s own words:

First off, I’m here alone all week. I’m the only person in the Tech Department. So naturally it has been a busy week, but I didn’t mind that so much. It’s just hard to get a lot done when I have to stop constantly to help someone track a problem. Alright, no big deal, that’s what I’m here for. What bothers me is that Monday and Tuesday everyone took the time to come to me for something, but no one had the two seconds afterward to say thanks. That’s ok, anyone in IT has had that “not appreciated”. No big deal. I have my iPod and my servers. They love me.

(more…)

There’s a reason we run a ton of servers with a bunch of different Internet providers and put them in a lot of different datacenters. That reason is apparent today as we sit in our shiny new offices in San Francisco and watch the lights flicker on and off.

It seems like the SOMA district of San Francisco has been hit with some power issues and with it a datacenter or two was taken offline. San Francisco blogging juggernaut Scott Beale (and he’s much more than a blogger) already posted about the issue and pointed out that lots of popular internet websites are offline now. The list includes Internet advertising company AdBrite, Craigslist, Netflix, Technorati and SixApart.

For those wondering, OpenDNS is online and fine. Our cache will update if any of these sites move datacenters and quickly change IPs. You can use our CacheCheck tool and see for yourself.

And I guess the real point of this post is to say that if you can’t reach some popular Internet sites right now, that’s why. Nothing to do with us.

Update: looks like everyone has recovered, mostly. Glad to see it. 5:15pm Pacific Time

There are just over three days left until the big day here in California, and we’re really excited to announce the fourth and final challenge.

We know sysadmins work magic. You know sysadmins work magic. Now it’s time to tell the rest of the world.

This week’s challenge: tell us the story of a time when you were the hero. A time when you saved an invaluable file. A network. A company. A life. Send your story to sysadminday at opendns dot com. Just like the previous three weeks, the best story wins a $50 gift card from American Express.

With this challenge we’re looking to be inspired — examples of accomplishing what is thought to be impossible. And we want the whole story, including the situation leading up to the heroic act and the response you got afterward.

For those of you who are uncomfortable patting yourself on the back, don’t worry about it. We’ll do it for you.

Good luck sysadmins!

Update: Submissions are due Friday at 9 a.m. PST.

Our users tell us they want power and intelligence. Or rather, our users want intelligence about their network and the power to make changes.

Today we’re taking it up a notch, turning your OpenDNS Account into a comprehensive Dashboard which gives you a more precise understanding of your DNS traffic. The ability to gain insight into your DNS traffic and then have the tools to act without needing to install any software or buy any appliances is a huge win that every IT administrator in the world will enjoy. On top of that, it’s completely free.

Until today, we had a rudimentary (and rickety by our standards) stats system that would show you only a birds-eye view of your data. For instance, you could view a top-line number of total DNS requests and your top 10 domains per day. If you wanted to know the 11th domain, you were out of luck.

Want to know how many DNS requests you are doing each day? Want to know what your top domains are? Want to block sites easily all in an intuitive interface? Done, done and done. Now, you can get the count of every domain looked up on your network, over any period of time. View the data as a chart, a table or drop a CSV file into Excel. This is your data.

I like to think that the OpenDNS Dashboard is like Google Analytics for your DNS.

In the coming days and weeks you will see the Dashboard grow in functionality as we offer more ways to interpret your data. For those concerned about any privacy implications related to this new launch, I’d encourage you to read our post. Learn how we’re now storing less data about our users than ever before and giving you full control over what data we keep.

Thanks to our new Dashboard, OpenDNS is the rock solid, reliable DNS that is safer, faster, smarter and now gives you near-real-time statistics and trends about what’s happening with your network. Let us know what you think!

We’re announcing a big update to our accounts system today. The name is changing from My Account to Dashboard to better reflect the services we are providing. A large part of this update includes providing you detailed insights, statistics and charts about the DNS traffic on your network. These insights come from data we log on our clusters of DNS servers.

It’s important to let you know that we don’t share your personal data. We don’t sell it. We don’t trade it. We don’t do anything with it that isn’t in your best interests.

How do we know what’s in your best interests? We don’t…so we give you control over any DNS data we collect. You can tell us to keep it (for the detailed insights and charts) or you can tell us to purge it. You can even tell us not to store it at all. We know that for most of you, keeping logs about your DNS traffic (which, again, we won’t ever sell) provides you a greater experience and quality of service. In fact, like everything else we do, this feature was driven by your feature requests and desires to see more about what’s going on with your network.

To underline these choices, we’ve made significant changes to our privacy policy to better explain our data policies and your data choices. I encourage you to read the privacy policy for yourself. The changes create a clear more straightforward policy that is more protective of your data as it relates to your use of our free service.

Among other changes, we’re providing more clarity about how long your DNS data is stored. Without an account, data is kept for 2 business days. (An account is optional.) With a free OpenDNS account, your data is kept indefinitely, unless you choose to delete data and have us stop recording your data. You can set your stats collection preference in the new Dashboard. If you delete your account, your DNS data is removed.

The policy was reorganized to put information about DNS first, since that’s our core business and the focus of many questions. We also updated some other sections to be more explicit wherever possible. Finally, in a small note, we clarified that the Creative Commons license applies to the privacy policy, not the site as a whole. This is the same change we made to the Terms of Use.

• Current OpenDNS privacy policy
• Old policy

Thanks for making OpenDNS the largest, fastest-growing DNS service in the world.

Our celebration of SysAdmin Appreciation Day continues. Only one week left until the big day, Friday, July 27th. I hope you’ve been planning your gifts for that special admin in your life.

Today, I’m happy to share the winner of SysAdmin Challenge No. 3, which was to share the best SysAdmin joke with us. The winner of this week’s $50 gift card from American Express is Steven A.

Here’s the winning entry.

Q. Where does a sysadmin go after work?
A. 127.0.0.1

Brief, witty, with a tip of the hat to network addressing… how could we not enjoy it?

Come back Monday, July 23rd to learn about the final weekly challenge.

(My thanks to Fabio Calvigioni (oRi0n) for translating this post into Italian, below.)

Update: Several commenters say the problem is gone, and that appears to be true. We hope it will continue. – July 23, 2007

We care about delivering a great Internet experience worldwide, and it appears that many Italians are poorly served by their current DNS infrastructure.

Several times over the last several months, Telecom Italia has blocked DNS requests from OpenDNS servers. What happens? Our customers in Italy are unable to resolve domains that uses Telecom Italia for their authoritative DNS, for example: pf.rossoalice.virgilio.it (a large Italian ISP).

For months, we’ve jumped through technical hoops to work around these blocks, even though all we’re doing is what any recursive DNS service would do: ask for the location of a domain from the respective authoritative server.

We’ve communicated through several channels: email, IRC, telephone. (We don’t speak Italian, but we’ve made an effort through translation services.)

Result? Nothing. (In DNS land, we’d call it a SERVFAIL.)

If anyone responsible and responsive at Telecom Italia wants to help us resolve this matter, we’re more than willing to work this out directly.

For all those Italian customers who have been affected now and again, we apologize. We are still trying to resolve this problem via normal channels. But we’ve been quite patient so far, and we’re a bit tired of banging our heads against this particular wall.

Here’s why we’re naming Telecom Italia.

First, dnsti.interbusiness.it and dnsts.interbusiness.it have blocked our requests.
Second, the interbusiness.it domain is owned by Telecom Italia, according to whois data.

Domain:             interbusiness.it
Status:             ACTIVE
Created:            1996-01-29 00:00:00
Last Update:        2007-01-30 00:36:13
Expire Date:        2008-01-29

Registrant
  Name:             Telecom Italia S.p.A.
  ContactID:        TELE616-ITNIC
  Address:          Via Paolo Di Dono, 44
                       Roma
                       00143
                       RM
                       IT
  Created:          2007-03-01 10:44:12
  Last Update:      2007-03-01 10:44:12

Nameservers
  dnsti.interbusiness.it
  dns.opb.interbusiness.it
  dns3.nic.it
  dnsts.interbusiness.it

I look forward to sharing a solution.

Telecom Italia non risponde ad OpenDNS

OpenDNS si impegna per fornire in tutto il mondo il miglior servizio agli utenti di Internet, ma sembra che molti italiani debbano fare i conti con un’infrastruttura DNS molto carente.

Per diverse volte negli ultimi mesi Telecom Italia ha bloccato richieste DNS dai server OpenDNS. Cosa succede quindi? Molti nostri clienti in Italia non riescono a risolvere nomi di domini che usano Telecom Italia come server DNS autoritativi. Per esempio, pf.rossoalice.virgilio.it (un importante ISP italiano) viene risolto in maniera errata.

Per mesi abbiamo utilizzato espedienti tecnici per aggirare questi blocchi, anche se tutto quello che stiamo facendo è quello che farebbe ogni servizio di DNS ricorsivo: richiedere l’indirizzo di un dominio al suo rispettivo server autoritativo.

Abbiamo provato a contattare Telecom Italia per email, IRC e telefono (non parliamo italiano ma abbiamo fatto dei tentativi utilizzando dei servizi di traduzione).

Risultato: nessuna risposta (nel campo dei DNS lo chiamiamo SERVFAIL).

Se qualche responsabile o addetto di Telecom Italia è interessato ad aiutarci a risolvere questo problema saremmo dispostissimi a collaborare direttamente in tale senso.

Chiediamo scusa a tutti i clienti italiani che hanno riscontrato e stanno ancora riscontrando questo problema. Stiamo ancora provando ad eliminare il blocco attraverso i normali canali. Fin qui siamo stati abbastanza pazienti ma ora siamo un po’ stanchi di doverci scervellare con questo problema.

Ecco perché crediamo che Telecom Italia sia la causa del problema.

Innanzitutto, dnsti.interbusiness.it e dnsts.interbusiness.it hanno bloccato le nostre richieste. Inoltre, il dominio interbusiness.it, secondo i dati del whois, appartiene a Telecom Italia.

Domain:             interbusiness.it
Status:             ACTIVE
Created:            1996-01-29 00:00:00
Last Update:        2007-01-30 00:36:13
Expire Date:        2008-01-29

Registrant
  Name:             Telecom Italia S.p.A.
  ContactID:        TELE616-ITNIC
  Address:          Via Paolo Di Dono, 44
                       Roma
                       00143
                       RM
                       IT
  Created:          2007-03-01 10:44:12
  Last Update:      2007-03-01 10:44:12

Nameservers
  dnsti.interbusiness.it
  dns.opb.interbusiness.it
  dns3.nic.it
  dnsts.interbusiness.it

Spero di aggiornarvi presto con una soluzione.

Last week you proved you’re creative and clever. This week we want to see your funny side.

Every profession has its standard-issue jokes. Among the more well-known are the one about the lawyer and the ambulance:

Q. What do you call a lawyer who doesn’t chase ambulances?
A. Retired

And the one about the slacker musician:

Q. What do you call a musician who breaks up with his girlfriend?
A. Homeless

We know great sysadmin jokes exist, so shoot us an email at sysadminday at opendns dot com and share the funniest ones you know. Like the previous challenges, the winner gets a $50 gift card from American Express. You have until this Friday at 9 a.m. PST to submit an entry.