We celebrated in San Francisco last night (and thanks to all who made it out - we had a blast and hope you did, too!) but the official System Administrator Appreciation Day is actually tomorrow — Friday, July 31. We’re doing our part to make sure the holiday gets the attention is deserves, but also know your boss probably doesn’t know about it. That changes this year.

Sign up for our free SysAdmin Day Boss Reminding Service. The email your boss will get will look like this. But sign up quickly because we’re sending the emails at 2:30 pm PST!

We’re growing like a weed. Yesterday, we handled 14 billion DNS requests in a single day for the first time. I didn’t get a chance to blog about our previous DNS request milestones because we’ve been heads-down working on some really awesome new features and adding a bunch of capacity.

We also updated our System Status page today to show you what I mean. We’ll be bringing up a new location in Amsterdam in the next couple months and we’re working on a strategy to bring OpenDNS closer to our users in Asia.

I’ve brought back the dancing banana to help celebrate this awesome achievement. I remember when we did 100 million requests total in a single month and how awesome *that* was. Today we’re handling over 200,000 requests per second at peak load. Simply awesome. My hats off to our great ops and engineering teams and thanks to all of you who have helped us grow over the last three years.

Since we launched OpenDNS three years ago, I’m proud to say we’ve made tremendous strides in our quest to make the Internet better. The innovations and improvements we’ve made to the DNS – a 25 year-old system that hadn’t been updated at all before OpenDNS came along – can’t be underestimated. With your help, we’ve built the world’s largest clearinghouse of phishing data and a community-powered Web content filtering system that keeps Internet users at schools, libraries, businesses and in households around the globe safe online. We’ve made Internet navigation more intelligent, provided you a better DNS than that from your ISP and delivered innovations like SmartCache and Conficker protection. In short – as a company and as a community we’ve built something really great.

Over the past few years we’ve been approached more and more frequently by other organizations wanting to integrate the OpenDNS service or some part of the OpenDNS service – our Web content filtering, or our faster, more reliable DNS – into their products and services. In many cases, their customers are actually asking for OpenDNS integration to make it easier for techies and non-techies alike to use our services. We’ve heard the same from you, too – many of you have asked us directly to work with router companies and make OpenDNS more accessible and easier to set up.

In January we announced a partnership with NETGEAR, a world-class router manufacturer, to deliver Web content filtering and phishing protection to its customers. And later this summer many new model NETGEAR routers will offer parental controls powered by OpenDNS, giving NETGEAR customers around the world an easy way to use our service.

And so today I am pleased to introduce Best Path Networks, a new arm of OpenDNS that will work to provide our services to partners. Each integration and partnership will be different – customized to provide value to different audiences. Where one partner elects to integrate and provide our Web content filtering and phishing protection, another partner might want only our faster, more reliable DNS, and sometimes a partner may choose to white-label the service as their own – and that’s okay with us.

Making OpenDNS available to more people is good for the Internet. It means more people are protected from phishing and other nefarious activities, and it means more people have a choice in their DNS. It also means the Internet performs more reliably and people are forced to tolerate fewer outages. It also means we’ll continue spending resources on improving and extending the OpenDNS network for you since all of our partners will be utilizing our existing (and growing) infrastructure.

We know you use OpenDNS because you love the service, so we’ve taken specific steps to ensure using OpenDNS will always be your choice. We also want to make sure you know we won’t form a partnership with any organization that limits your ability to use OpenDNS as you do today.

It’s been three years since we started OpenDNS and it seems like we’ve accomplished a lot, but we’ve only just begun innovating – we have a roadmap of great new features we’ll continue to deliver to you throughout the course of this year that we’ll announce here on this blog. As always, we welcome feedback – in Idea Bank, our forums or right here in the comments.

Today we announced one of the most significant DNS innovations of the last 25 years. SmartCache, our new DNS record-handling technology, renders frustrating authoritative DNS outages irrelevant for OpenDNS users. It’s both incredibly simple and invaluable to Internet users.

Here’s how it works: When an authoritative DNS provider suffers an outage, all of the Web sites it provides service to are taken offline. They’re inaccessible for everyone on the Internet. But no longer for OpenDNS users. Our servers will now immediately look for the last known good address for the site in our caches, and use that to load the site. So effectively OpenDNS users will be able to access Web sites that appear down for everyone else. For our millions of users at businesses, schools and libraries around the world, saving them Internet access interruptions and the time they waste is invaluable.

Authoritative DNS outages happen frequently and can be a big problem. Just a few weeks ago, it’s reported that major authoritative DNS provider UltraDNS suffered an outage that took Salesforce.com, Amazon.com and Petco.com offline for several hours. In such a case, SmartCache would fix the inaccessibility problem and allow people to visit the sites through the outage.

This is just the latest in a long series of DNS innovations we’ve developed and passed on to you. Most recently it was blocking the Conficker worm from phoning home. By blocking the domain names the worm used, we were and continue to be able to protect people around the globe. Trust that we’re committed to continue to innovate and give you easy-to-use services that make your Internet experience better.

SmartCache is available immediately as an opt-in feature. Just log in to your dashboard and look for the check box in your Advanced Settings. For those tech geeks, this only applies to queries where the authoritative server hands back a SERVFAIL response code in addition to any query that simply goes unanswered.

Let us know what you think of the new feature in the comments here.

Here at OpenDNS we’ve spent the past several months working to keep you safe from the Conficker worm. Using the OpenDNS service is widely considered to be one of the easiest and most guaranteed ways to protect your network. And today we roll out a free Conficker detection tool to give you actionable insight into whether or not you have Conficker on your network.

As David mentioned here, we’re in a unique position as your DNS provider of choice to block the worm at the DNS level and prevent it from phoning home. We’re also in a unique position to tell you, based on DNS queries coming from your account, if your network has been infected with Conficker. Log into your OpenDNS account now and you’ll see a banner indicating you either have Conficker or you don’t. This is a tremendously valuable service, and representative of a key innovation on the DNS. If you have friends or colleagues not using OpenDNS yet, we urge you to recommend the service.

Even though we prevent the worm from phoning home, we advise everyone with Conficker to run the disinfection tool. Microsoft offers a great one here.

Also today we’re sharing data about geographic distribution of the worm’s C-varient to date. This information is based on OpenDNS data alone, so is not necessarily representative of overall geographic Conficker distribution.

We’ll continue blocking Conficker for all of our users, through our on-by-default Botnet Protection feature. And we’ll keep you posted with updates about the virus, if/when we have them, on this blog.