Now that Halloween is over, we embark on the two month journey through the American holiday season. I love the holidays; it’s all togetherness and helping others and giving thanks from here.
In that spirit, I got to thinking about all the ways we’ve been working to make OpenDNS easier for you and yours to use. OpenDNS is really a service every network should be running, regardless of how large or small your network is. So this goodiebag of helpful tools has something for everyone — from households to schools to large, global enterprises. We’ll keep thinking up more ways to make OpenDNS better, but as always, if you have suggestions I encourage you to submit them at Idea Bank, post to the Forums or email me directly at allison at opendns dot com.
1. A brand new video tutorial. This is a biggie, and something we’ve wanted to do for a long time. OpenDNS is not always the easiest thing to explain. All Internet users relate to the frustration of unreliable Internet and slow page-load times, and see the value of free Web content filtering. When we say OpenDNS is a service that’ll make your Internet safer, faster, smarter and more reliable, free, everyone wants it. But the setting up part — the finding your DNS settings and swapping your ISP’s IP addresses for OpenDNS’s — sometimes presents a challenge. The video tutorial walks you through the entire process in under 5 minutes.
2. Schedule a Demo // Request References services. This one is not new, necessarily, but since we’ve never really called your attention to it, I figured now’s as good a time as any. The Schedule a Demo and Request References were really designed with larger organizations in mind. We’ve learned that when you guys make a decision about using a new technology on your network, there are often lots of different folks involved in the decision making process. Sometimes there’s even paperwork that needs to be filled out, and calls that need to be made to existing, happy users of the service in question. Scheduling a demo couldn’t be easier. Just tell us a bit about you and your organization to prepare the OpenDNS rep who’ll do the demoing. Invite coworkers and get all of your questions answered on one snappy call. Same thing for requesting references. We’ll match you with an organization that’s similiar to yours. Have you seen how many happy customers we have?
3. Expanded router selection. We’re always working to keep our selection of routers in the instructions updated, but recently we went big and added several. Today we offer instructions for 16 different router manufacturers from the well-known Linksys, NETGEAR and D-Links to some more rare models. The goal is to have every router represented, to make it as easy as possible for everyone to set up OpenDNS, so look for us to continue adding to our gallery.
Happy holidays, everyone.
Chris Webster
Re: point 3, I’d be interested in seeing an (official OpenDNS) guide for some open-source router firmware such as DD-WRT and Tomato.
While some may argue that if you’re tech-savvy enough to set up something like DD-WRT, you should be able to work out OpenDNS, it’s nice to have a guide that details the “proper” way it should be set up, so that everything works as expected.
Chris
posted on November 3rd, 2008 at 5:09 pm
rchk
lots of info here:
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/OpenDNS
posted on November 4th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Chris Webster
rchk,
From my point of view (at least), there actually isn’t a whole lot of information there.
You can find out about:
- Basic Setup (straight from OpenDNS generic instructions
- set up a dynamic IP
- Intercept DNS Port
Anyway, like I mentioned above, would be great to have some “official” instructions for some of the popular open-source router software, like DD-WRT and Tomato.
Chris
posted on November 5th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
OpenDNS fan
As a DD-WRT OpenDNS user I can only add,
/usr/sbin/iptables -I FORWARD 1 -p tcp -d 208.67.222.222 –dport 53 -j ACCEPT
/usr/sbin/iptables -I FORWARD 2 -p tcp -d 208.67.220.220 –dport 53 -j ACCEPT
/usr/sbin/iptables -I FORWARD 3 -p tcp –dport 53 -j logdrop
Thanks for the great service OpenDNS!
posted on November 6th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
Shizzle
Or better yet, when are we going to see an official Linux OpenDNS client that actually works. I have tried some of the hack jobs available out there to no avail. All my home machines run Ubuntu and I really haven’t had the chance to update my firmware with DD-WRT and configure it.
posted on November 8th, 2008 at 9:49 am
Jeremy
@Shizzle. Linux already has an official OpenDNS client. It’s called /etc/resolv.conf.
How else do you think your DNS configuration works?
What would a “Official Linux OpenDNS” do? I have no idea, as there exists none for any other operating systems, so I really have no idea what you’re getting at.
posted on November 13th, 2008 at 4:49 am
Gloria Justice
Your site caught my eye… looks amazing! I am in the midst of trying to solve a DNS problem with one of the three computers we have on our home wireless internet system. If I installed your software on one of the operational computers would it help me solve my problem, or do I need to have all three computers able to communicate with the web before downloading OpenDNS? Just curious. Thanks.
posted on November 16th, 2008 at 3:05 am
Shizzle
@Jeremy, I meant an updater client, sorry ’bout that. I find it inconvenient to have to log into OpenDNS or DNS-O-Matic to update my network settings and apply my “filtering” when I boot up, not DNS configurations.
There is an updater client for Windows and Mac that update network settings upon boot up to ensure you receive content filtering if you choose to use it. I haven’t found a Linux one, that works anyway. I tried ddclient but could not get it to work. I guess I could leave my Windows machine on all the time and update my network settings that way but no one’s home most of the day so why bother.
My DNS configuration does not work by editing the resolv.conf, I set my DNS configuration at the router level, so all my machines use it automatically. But thanks for the info.
posted on November 20th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Svein
I am in the middle of setting up a server at home that will be a model for other networks I will set up.
The server is running Ubuntu 8.10 with LAMP, BIND9, SSH, SAMBA and some other stuff.
The server will NOT be exposed to the internet (behind a firewall and NAT), but as networkconnections are slow here, I would like to run it as a caching server for the lan as well as resolving for the servers on the lan (yes, homenetwork with multiple servers
).
I am not a stranger to editing configuration files, but prefer using Webmin. So it would be very nice to see a step-by-step tutorial on how to set up this using Webmin. And who would be better at doing such a tutorial than the people behind OpenDNS? Of course, I use OpenDNS as the forward DNS (right term?).
posted on November 21st, 2008 at 6:55 am
maintenance
@ Gloria Justice:
You would change the DNS settings in your router, not on each computer. There is no software to install for this.
The software is for a dynamic IP updater, which is useful if your ISP assigns IP addresses dynamically (this means that you do not have a static IP address that never changes). If you do not plan to make use of OpenDNS network Dashboard, or the filtering/blocking services, you would not need it. The OpenDNS Updater simply alerts your OpenDNS account when your IP address changes, so that these other services will continue working. Again, it is not needed to simply use the OpenDNS servers rather than your ISP DNS server.
Unfortunately, I don’t think any of this is going to resolve an issue internal to your home network. What is the problem you are having?
@Jeremy, @Shizzle:
I am thinking Shizzle means an OpenDNS Updater client for Linux. If that is the case, it’s a cron job.
posted on November 27th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Tech-Chaos
Some help for setting OpenDNS up on Altel/Windstream, DSL for the SpeedStreem 4200 DSL Modem.
[IMG]http://i36.tinypic.com/2evvlfn.gif[/IMG]
http://i36.tinypic.com/2evvlfn.gif
1st. Login to your modem at: http://192.168.254.254/
2nd. Go to “Setup” then “DHCP”.
3rd. Change the Primary DNS Server to: 208.67.222.222
4Th. Change the Secondary DNS Server to: 208.67.220.220
[IMG]http://i35.tinypic.com/vhufkp.jpg[/IMG]
http://i35.tinypic.com/vhufkp.jpg
5th. Click the “Apply” button then reboot the modem, so the new setting will take affect. If all went well your network should be using OpenDNS.
SWEET!
posted on November 30th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Alvaro Gilabert
For those dealing with Linux and/or OpenWRT firmware (that includes DD-WRT), you can update your network if you are using dynamic assignment with the curl command
# curl -k -u username:password https://updates.opendns.com/nic/update?hotsname=network
posted on December 4th, 2008 at 12:40 am