July 30 — System Administrator Day — is fast approaching. If you are a SysAdmin and you want to guarantee you’ll receive some kudos from your boss on Friday, make sure to sign up for our Boss Reminder Service. You only have one more day — tomorrow we’re sending out the reminders first thing in the morning, to give your boss plenty of time to buy you a thank you note, Starbucks gift card, or new server rack.

As a reminder, here’s what the note your manager gets will look like:

The Black Hat conference is taking place this week in Las Vegas, bringing together security researchers and academics from all over the world to discuss the most pressing information security issues. Among the many (overly) hyped vulnerabilities set to be revealed is one the researcher claims threatens the security of “millions” of home routers. And according to the researcher, OpenDNS is not a fix.

Since the vulnerability was first publicized, we’ve made several attempts to contact Craig Heffner, the researcher, and get more detail. We’ve phoned. We’ve emailed. We’ve contacted reporters who’ve spoken to the researcher and had their help connecting to the researcher. I’ve even Facebook messaged his coworkers. I haven’t had a single reply.

Why the aggressive outreach from us? Because we want to be a fix. We work hard to make OpenDNS a solution to the many problems system administrators and security pros face. In fact, our entire service was designed to address the problems you want it to address. The only information we have is that this deals with DNS Rebinding. Fortunately, OpenDNS has secured users from DNS rebinding attacks for a long time. But we don’t know what’s different about Craig’s new rebinding attack.

When Dan Kaminsky and his firm IOActive famously revealed a major DNS flaw at the very same conference a few years ago, OpenDNS by then had worked to ensure that our service was secure and not threatened by the vulnerability. When the Conficker virus gained traction and proved it posed a real threat, security firm Kaspersky Labs and OpenDNS quickly teamed to block the domains from resolving for OpenDNS users. This sort of cooperation by industry leaders, groups and companies is, in my humble opinion, exemplary. It’s absolutely in the best interest of Internet users as it reduces the window of vulnerability. And we’re always to happy to keep details of security issues secret, so the researcher can announce it without the risk of someone else stealing their thunder.

Could OpenDNS be a fix to the vulnerability said to threaten millions of home routers? Probably, but I can’t say since I have no information about how it works. All we know is that it has to do with DNS Rebinding attacks, which is a very old threat and is one we’ve done a great job of protecting users from in the past. Is OpenDNS a fix as-is already? Can’t say that either. It might be. Or we might have to tweak something. What I can say is that we have world-class engineers who are ready and willing to do whatever work possible to make OpenDNS a solution. But we can’t do that, because we don’t have the cooperation of the researcher.

In any event, at OpenDNS we believe in Responsible Disclosure. It’d be nice if Craig Heffner, the researcher in this case, believed in the same.

We’re always working to make OpenDNS even easier to use, and we’re happy to roll out some improvements today that make accessing all of the features and statistics you rely on even easier. Users logging in to their OpenDNS Dashboard today might notice a few cosmetic changes: we’ve added a new “Home” tab that neatly summarizes all the networks you’ve added to your OpenDNS account and serves as a launching pad for making settings changes or viewing statistics for those networks quickly.

All of the features and settings you’ve come to expect from OpenDNS are still there, and they’re all in the same places you used to access them. We’ve just added a new homepage that makes accessing those parts of the Dashboard a little bit faster.

We’ve rolled out one other change to our community pages today as well. When you visit our blog, forums, IdeaBank, or other community pages for the first time, you’ll be prompted via a pop-up window to choose a display name, if you haven’t made that choice already in the My Account tab of your Dashboard. This change allows users who signed up for OpenDNS with their email address as their username to keep their email address private while interacting with the OpenDNS community. Here’s what it will look like when you are prompted to pick a display name:

If you haven’t yet, login to your OpenDNS Dashboard and check out the facelift. Let us know what you think in the comments.

It’s hard to believe, but it was four years ago this month that OpenDNS launched. Just a short time into our quest to make the world’s Internet safer, faster, smarter and more reliable, we’ve grown into the world’s largest DNS provider and achieved some unprecedented milestones. Our growth is largely attributable to people like you spreading the word about our service and introducing others to a better DNS, and we can’t thank you enough for that.

Just a few of the our milestones:

• A full one percent of all Internet users in the world — more than 18 million people globally — are using OpenDNS.
• One out of every three public K-12 schools in the U.S. uses OpenDNS, including some of the country’s largest school districts in the largest cities, like Baltimore, Detroit and San Diego.
• Just shy of 1 million phishes submitted to the PhishTank, the free community Web site where anyone can submit, verify, track and share phishing data. (Help us hit the 1 million landmark — submit a phish here.)
• A staggering 26+ billion DNS queries per day.

And of course, we’ve accomplished all of this with zero downtime, making the Internet more reliable than ever before for all of our users.

We’re going to be celebrating our birthday on Twitter over the next week by giving away four prizes (for our fourth birthday) every day. What kind of stuff are we talking about? Prizes include free home subscriptions for OpenDNS Deluxe, stylish OpenDNS t-shirts, goodie bags with awesome OpenDNS merch, and more!

Participating is simple — the easiest way to enter is to follow OpenDNS on Twitter and then retweet this post:

OpenDNS.com turns 4 this month! Giving away 4 prizes daily to celebrate. Follow @OpenDNS & RT this to enter! #OpenDNS4

Or, simply start following @OpenDNS and then tell your followers why they should use OpenDNS, too. Include #OpenDNS4 to have your tweets included in the contest. Each tweet is a separate entry, so feel free to enter more than once. We’ll pick daily winners randomly from all who enter, and we’ll follow up with you on Twitter if you’re a winner!

Just a reminder that we’re hosting a webinar next Tuesday (July 13th) to outline the benefits of OpenDNS in higher education environments: colleges, universities, and research institutions. Summer break also presents the perfect opportunity for post-secondary schools to test OpenDNS without impacting access to the Internet or key learning and research tools.

In the webinar, we’ll discuss how easy it is to deploy OpenDNS at in classrooms, computer labs, libraries, and even dormitories, manage network settings and Web content filtering preferences from our online interface, and stay on top of your colleges’ network usage with detailed reporting and statistics. OpenDNS doesn’t require any appliances, so you can be up and running across multiple sites in minutes. Learn more about how OpenDNS makes educational networks safer, faster, smarter and more reliable during our short 30-minute webinar.

Date:  Tuesday, July 13

Time: 11 AM PDT – 11:30 AM PDT

Sign up here, and don’t forget to invite your colleagues!

If you’ve been following along on the OpenDNS blog, you know that over the past few weeks we’ve made it our mission to celebrate and reward system administrators, with both the SysAdmin of the Year Awards, and our upcoming System Administrator Appreciation Party. System Administrator Appreciation Day is fast approaching — July 30 — and with it comes the promise of kudos and thanks from the people you work with.

But what if you think that there’s a possibility your boss or manager might not remember about System Administrator Appreciation Day? We’ve got you covered there as well, thanks to our one-step boss reminder service. All you need to do is fill out the important info — your name, your boss’ name and email*, etc — on this handy form and we’ll email your boss on your behalf. Here’s what the message will look like:

_{*We promise not to use your email, or your boss’ email for anything except the friendly reminder service.}

The nominations have been submitted, the votes have been tallied, and our esteemed panel of judges have deliberated for hours. The results? We’re excited to give SysAdmin of the Year honors to Paul Dobbs.

What makes Paul worthy of the prize? He works at the John Howard Society of Durham Region, a nonprofit in Ontario Canada that provides services to nearly 20,000 people per year — and he has a budget of zero dollars per year. Without any annual budget, Paul has increased technology access from 45 computers to nearly 200 computers, from one old NT server to six 2003-R2 servers, unified the network between all offices and reduced Internet costs by more than $6,000 per year.

As Paul has gotten JHS new equipment through grants and funding proposals, he’s put the organization in a position where it can actually give computers away to others; it now donates complete systems to JHS clients who have no financial resources to buy their own.

Paul isn’t the only winner though; here are the other talented award winners:

K-12 Award: In addition to managing a network of 700 computers, Saint Francis High School’s Larry Steinke has also made the entire campus wireless, set up Saint Frances on VOIP phones, installed Smartboards and created a technology committee to review and establish IT plans. Myron Nessan, Saint Francis’ director of finance, says “he does all this with great personality, professionalism and purpose which is appreciated by all he works with.”

DevOps Award: The award for DevOps excellence goes to R.I. Pienaar. He wrote mcollective, a distributed sysadmin framework, runs DevOps meetings in London and is a great contributor to Puppet.

Flying Solo Award: Not too many SysAdmins can say their work saves lives, but Espen Ødegaard can. When the Conficker worm attacked all the workstations as the hospital he worked at, Ødegaard worked tirelessly for three days — by himself — to clean up every workstation. “It is not unlikely that his efforts saved lives,” wrote nominator Odd Henriksen, “considering how little information medical personnel had on their patients while their computers were down.”

Shoestring Budget Award: Alec Cedrone, manager of information systems at Weston Nurseries has saved money on everything from installing Ubiquti Bullet2MP himself to looking to liquidated purchasing options, to choosing OpenDNS for Web content filtering. He estimates his thrifty ways have saved the company almost $35,000.

Neat Freak Award: Given to Kris Wessels, a SysAdmin in the department of computer science at K.U. Leuven in Belgium. Complete photographic evidence of his cabling prowess can be found here.

Disaster Response: While taking a long awaited vacation, Matt Sokolow was texted by his boss. There was no Internet connectivity, no network connectivity at the office — nothing was working. Matt wins the disaster response award for spending three plus hours while on vacation on the phone with a general manager, walking her through everything from restarting a DHCP server to reading error logs to restoring from a backup.

Large Scale Deployment Award: When Dale Hobbs, network administrator for Lush Cosmetics, began to investigate what employees at Lush’s retail stores were looking at online, he realized the bulk of their web traffic was to non work-related sites. The solution was to deploy OpenDNS — at 149 retail locations across the country. The results? A boost in employee productivity, cost savings for the company, and being given the Large Scale Deployment Award.

Paul will receive a pass to The USENIX Association’s 24th Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA ’10) — valued at approximately $900 — and the other award winners will all be given a $50 cash prize. Special appreciation to our friends at The USENIX Association for providing the grand prize!

Thanks to all who entered and we hope to see you on July 28th at the System Administrator Appreciation Party!