Nominations for the 2011 SysAdmin Awards will soon close and we want to make sure you get your nominations in. Deadline for entries is midnight PST July 12 so there’s still plenty of time. Take a few minutes NOW and honor yourself or an IT person/SysAdmin you admire and help him or her get the respect and acknowledgment they deserve. To nominate, tell us which award you are nominating the person for and email awards (at) opendns (dot) com.

And if you’re wondering, Yes! It’s okay to nominate yourself. You may be such a hero that nobody even knows what you went through to save the day!

The OpenDNS SysAdmin Awards is the only awards program that honors only SysAdmins and the great work they do. Because as we all know, SysAdmin’ing is a thankless job.

To recap, there are six categories this year and from all of the submissions in the six categories we’ll select one individual for the crown honor: 2011 SysAdmin of the Year.

The six categories being awarded are:

Best Disaster Response Award

A hurricane, a fire, an earthquake. A datacenter meltdown. Something that would have caused business operations to shut down completely, if it weren’t for this SysAdmin. Like a knight in shining armor, he or she managed to keep the network up and running. Your submission should include details about the disaster and how the SysAdmin handled it. If it involved you holding servers over your head in rising flood waters while you are wearing a snorkel, you would be a great candidate for this category.

Neat Freak Award

SysAdmins take pride in documentation and organization of cabling, wiring and racks. Wow the judges in this category with photographic evidence showing that your SysAdmin takes their wiring and racking work seriously and is the neatest and most organized of them all.

Shoestring Budget Award

This SysAdmin works wonders with a seriously tight budget. Tell us about the SysAdmin with the craziest buildout done on the cheap. We need details for this submission – tell the judges specs, total cost and what kind of awesomeness it powers. We respect the fact that you had to string fiber between buildings with a frisbee because you had no budget to trench across the street.

Flying Solo Award

Even with a team of talented operators, SysAdmin’ing is not easy work. But when flying solo it can be downright heroic. Regale us with a (true) story of the heroic SysAdmin who saved the world (or did something awesome) to save the day (or company) all by his or herself.

Large-Scale Deployment Award

Some jobs are too challenging to comprehend, but not for the SysAdmin who wins our Large-Scale Deployment Award. Tell us the story of a SysAdmin who has managed a massive amount of infrastructure from their diety-like fingertips with finesse and elegance. Tell us how big the deployment was, when it was built and what some of the impressive metrics it offered were (pageviews, megahertz, memory, rendering, etc.). Note, if you are the chief architect behind AWS and you are submitted as a candidate you will win this award.

DevOps Award

Often, the most successful SysAdmins are the ones who can write code and work well with others. OpenDNS and other large Internet sites like Flickr attribute much of their success to the close collaboration between engineering and operations. Share a success story of your own where the SysAdmin’s collaboration played a key role in a successful engineering project. Tell us when this happened, who was involved, and how you know it was successful.

The Bounty: Winners will be announced here on this blog, and all will receive a gift package from OpenDNS full of awesome goodies. Winners will also be VIP invited guests at the 5th Annual SysAdmin Appreciation Party in San Francisco on July 28, 2011 (which everyone is invited to).

Remember, email awards at OpenDNS dot com and wow us with your submission. Don’t wait to nominate! Good luck to all!

Have we mentioned how much we love SysAdmins here at OpenDNS? Not only do we love them, but we spend a good amount of our time thinking about how we can make their lives better and their jobs easier. Because after all, being a SysAdmin is a thankless job – it’s often not until something goes wrong that a SysAdmin is acknowledged and appreciated.

To celebrate our favorite unsung heroes, OpenDNS is announcing the fifth annual OpenDNS SysAdmin Awards, the only awards contest that honors only SysAdmins and the great work they do that everyone benefits from. This is your place to acknowledge the SysAdmin, network operator or IT person in your office, a SysAdmin you know or even yourself.

There are six categories, and from all of the submissions in the six categories we’ll select one individual for the crown honor: 2011 OpenDNS SysAdmin of the Year. Last year’s submission count was unprecedented and we look forward to better this year.

Without further ado, here are the six categories, plus what our judging panel — consisting of the OpenDNS operations team (which includes OpenDNS CEO David Ulevitch) — will be looking for in each category.

Best Disaster Response Award

A hurricane, a fire, an earthquake. A datacenter meltdown. Something that would have caused business operations to shut down completely, if it weren’t for this SysAdmin. Like a knight in shining armor, he or she managed to keep the network up and running. Your submission should include details about the disaster and how the SysAdmin handled it. If it involved you holding servers over your head in rising flood waters while you are wearing a snorkel, you would be a great candidate for this category.

Neat Freak Award

SysAdmins take pride in documentation and organization of cabling, wiring and racks. Wow the judges in this category with photographic evidence showing that your SysAdmin takes their wiring and racking work seriously and is the neatest and most organized of them all.

Shoestring Budget Award

This SysAdmin works wonders with a seriously tight budget. Tell us about the SysAdmin with the craziest buildout done on the cheap. We need details for this submission – tell the judges specs, total cost and what kind of awesomeness it powers. We respect the fact that you had to string fiber between buildings with a frisbee because you had no budget to trench across the street.

Flying Solo Award

Even with a team of talented operators, SysAdmin’ing is not easy work. But when flying solo it can be downright heroic. Regale us with a (true) story of the heroic SysAdmin who saved the world (or did something awesome) to save the day (or company) all by his or herself.

Large-Scale Deployment Award

Some jobs are too challenging to comprehend, but not for the SysAdmin who wins our Large-Scale Deployment Award. Tell us the story of a SysAdmin who has managed a massive amount of infrastructure from their diety-like fingertips with finesse and elegance. Tell us how big the deployment was, when it was built and what some of the impressive metrics it offered were (pageviews, megahertz, memory, rendering, etc.). Note, if you are the chief architect behind AWS and you are submitted as a candidate you will win this award.

DevOps Award

Often, the most successful SysAdmins are the ones who can write code and work well with others. OpenDNS and other large Internet sites like Flickr attribute much of their success to the close collaboration between engineering and operations. Share a success story of your own where the SysAdmin’s collaboration played a key role in a successful engineering project. Tell us when this happened, who was involved, and how you know it was successful.

How to nominate a SysAdmin for an award: To submit yourself or a fellow SysAdmin, just email awards at opendns dot com with the award category in the subject line. Follow the instructions for the category in your submission. Hint: The more detail in the submission the better.

Winners will be announced here on this blog, and all will receive a gift package from OpenDNS full of awesome goodies. Winners will also be VIP invited guests at the 5th Annual SysAdmin Appreciation Party in San Francisco on July 28, 2011 (more details forthcoming). Deadline for entry is midnight July 12, 2011.

Happy hacking and good luck!

It’s still Tuesday, June 7 here at OpenDNS headquarters in San Francisco, but in lots of places around the world it’s already June 8, World IPv6 Day. That means for the next 24 hours OpenDNS.com and hundreds of other websites are officially reachable on IPv6.

We’re big fans of World IPv6 Day, both in concept and in practice. Spearheaded by The Internet Society, it’s a 24-hour test flight where organizations around the world – ISPs and technology companies like OpenDNS – are encouraged to offer their content over IPv6. Without such a broad-reaching and compelling reason to invest the resources to make it happen, lots of companies would have continued putting it off.

And we’re in excellent company in our participation in World IPv6 Day: Facebook.com, Google.com and Yahoo.com have joined the effort, as well.

In addition to participating by upgrading our website, we went a step further helping to prepare your network for the transition to IPv6. To make your life easier we built a free, fully IPv6-compliant DNS sandbox for you to use to test without consequence before you move everything over.

Happy World IPv6 Day and Happy (IPv6) Hacking!

This morning we opened up our IPv6 Sandbox, starting with the most important piece – a globally-distributed recursive IPv6 DNS service. This means if you have IPv6 connectivity, you can now talk to us over native IPv6 transport. Instructions for getting started are over in the sandbox.

Why is this important? As more and more end-users get IPv6 connectivity, many continue to use IPv4 DNS servers. Many of these IPv4 recursive DNS servers don’t have IPv6 connectivity, meaning they can’t talk to other DNS servers over IPv6. As IPv6 adoption increases and content begins to appear that is only accessible over IPv6, it’s critical that people use DNS servers which are able to talk over both IPv4 and IPv6.

This is the first of a number of exciting new announcements we’ll be making over the coming months. If you have IPv6 connectivity, I hope you’ll try out our IPv6 DNS servers and let us know what you think. There isn’t support yet for filtering or dashboard management, but that’s coming soon. We wanted to get this in front of folks now, well ahead of World IPv6 Day on June 8th.

Now we just need a “You’re using IPv6″ button to go along with our Sweet OpenDNS button.

Use this button on your site!

Here at OpenDNS we’re always working on expanding our global footprint and adding datacenter locations around the world. Understanding why this is important is easy when you know two things:

1. The more servers and locations we have in operation, the more capacity we have.
2. The closer you are topologically to an OpenDNS server, the faster your DNS.

Today we’re announcing a new datacenter location in Frankfurt, Germany. Adding to our existing London and Amsterdam locations, the Frankfurt location helps make sure our DNS service is the fastest available to Internet users in Europe and provides much more overall capacity to European users (50% more).

Setting up a datacenter for the largest open recursive DNS service in the world is actually a pretty fun part of the job since we don’t get to rack and stack gear very often. While we have brought new sites online without ever setting foot onsite, by drop-shipping gear to a remote site and bringing it up from HQ, I was looking forward to a trip to Germany and volunteered to go and do the install myself. As icing on the cake, David surprised me with a first class upgrade, which was an awesome experience.

Doing a remote install? Some travel tips…

I’ve come up with a few tips for fellow operations folks who are doing remote installs:

1. Have a solid deployment checklist of everything you want at the site. That doesn’t just include routers, switches and servers, but everything you might need including screws, cage-nuts, power cables, extra power cables for your laptop, patch cables, couplers, adapters, SFPs, etc.
2. Set up all your power at the datacenter and make sure it’s working before you leave. Make sure you send your remotely manageable power distribution unit ahead of time. Power plugs and configurations differ country by country and you want to make sure your power is lit and working long before you fly somewhere to do an install. Despite the increased cost of a remotely managed power distribution unit, it will pay for itself after 1 or 2 remote-hands charges from your datacenter provider.
3. If you can avoid it, don’t book a flight until your gear has cleared customs. Customs handling time varies by country and there is nothing worse than arriving on-site and not being able to access your gear. We generally allocate about a week for customs in Europe, and a bit longer in Asia. In more developing nations, it can vary wildly from days to months.
4. Always plan for extra days. We prefer to schedule the installs to start on a Saturday or Sunday and then go into a Monday or Tuesday. This way we have the weekend when the datacenter is not busy to do all the physical racking and stacking. The on-site folks are more forgiving about making a mess usually, and often even offer to lend a hand. By the time Monday morning comes around, everything is racked and powered, and we can now work with the various networking providers to bring circuits online with the regular on-duty techs. There’s nothing wrong with finishing your install on a Monday and spending a couple days sightseeing. Having the extra time gives you some buffer to fix any major hiccups that may happen, and to source a replacement part locally.
5. The last tip is probably the most important. Take photos along the way, and at the end. We love having photos of our install, which we archive in our Wiki. This way, if we ever need to request remote-hands work from techs in the future, we don’t simply have to rely on labels on gear to figure things out. We can actually describe the location of equipment or annotate instructions for them on complicated remote-hands work.

I’ve included some photos of our install for you below. Hope you enjoy the photos, and our new Frankfurt datacenter!

Thanks for reading this far – now ditch your boring job and come work with me so we can add more datacenters and continue building the greatest DNS service in the world.

George Patterson is the Director of Operations for OpenDNS and one of the company’s earliest employees. Every day George and his team manage 15 datacenter locations around the world that collectively handle 30 billion DNS queries daily. OpenDNS has never had downtime. George likes to hire ops people who can code.

Writing a Privacy Policy is hard work. A part of me would love to just have a Privacy Policy that says, “We won’t do anything stupid” — Just like I’d love a Terms of Service that says “Don’t do anything stupid.” Unfortunately, the lawyers and the laws of many countries won’t let us get away with that, so the next best thing is to have a Privacy Policy that is clear, specific, and easy to read. With that in mind, we’ve updated our Privacy Policy to be much more specific about what we do and what we do not do with data supplied by our customers.

The new policy is a big improvement from our current policy and I think it goes a long way in clarifying to our users what happens with their data. Like our always-improving service, our Privacy Policy is a living document that will continue to be updated over the years to more accurately reflect the business we are in and to respond to the important privacy concerns of the day. Here are some of the important changes in the document:

• We are switching over to a new stats collection system (hadoop-based) and so we are now storing raw DNS logs for longer periods of time. The time we store them now is variable (based on disk space) but right now is about a month. Since it’s likely to change over time, we are now clear in communicating that we retain data like this for a longer period of time.
• We’ve updated the language to clarify that using the OpenDNS service does provide us with personally identifiable information, since it provides us with your IP address, which is considered personally identifiable information.
• We added explicit language to communicate that we do not share, sell or rent access to our customer DNS queries. The obvious exceptions are when we need to share data in order to provide a service you have asked for or that we require to run our service, or when we have to satisfy a legal mandate. But nobody can come to us and purchase a raw feed of the customer DNS traffic, we just aren’t interested in that business.
• Separate from the DNS queries, OpenDNS works with vendors and partners to provide services to us (i.e. network monitoring software, email newsletter management) and to you (i.e. malware researchers). To perform these services we sometimes need to share specific pieces of personal information with them. We’ve clarified when we do this and have explained that all are doing so at our request and are limited in their scope.

You should read and understand our new Privacy Policy, as I’ve only summarized pieces of it above. Here’s a link to our new Privacy Policy, and for your reference, a link to the deprecated policy. The new policy is effective beginning today.

I hope that this new policy better clarifies how we protect and respect your data as you use our service. If you have questions you can always contact your account manager or our customer support team. And, of course, you can email me.

We just hit a big milestone at OpenDNS and I wanted to share it with you. Today OpenDNS successfully resolved the most DNS requests we’ve ever handled in a single day – 30 billion DNS requests!

We recently brought a Singapore datacenter online to handle traffic from Asia, and we’re in the final stages of setting up a new European datacenter in Frankfurt as well. As we continue to grow, resolving billions more DNS requests per day, we’ll add new server locations to meet demand and ensure the OpenDNS service is the ultra-reliable DNS service you’ve come to depend on.

In addition to thanking our wonderful customers, I want to give a special thanks to our elite operations team that runs our global infrastructure. This team of four (yes, four) exceptionally talented individuals manages an infrastructure that covers over a dozen datacenters with hundreds of servers, peers and interconnects – 24×7, 365 days a year. Speaking of which, we’re growing the operations group, and just about every other department at OpenDNS, so if you are looking for a fun and challenging work environment, join the team!

We pride ourselves at OpenDNS on listening to your ideas, feedback and suggestions. After all, much of our success can be attributed to users like you telling your friends about us, setting up OpenDNS on your family member’s routers and suggesting OpenDNS to network admins at your work. The Support Center and Idea Bank are two places where we take feedback about how we’re doing, but we know we can do more to listen to the people who use our service every day.

That’s why we’ve launched a new quarterly online survey. Some of you may have seen an invitation in the past day or two to participate in a brief questionnaire. The four-question survey is a way for us to measure how we’re doing in our goal of providing you with the best DNS service on the planet.

With your feedback, we’ll identify the places we’re doing well — and work on making them even better — and we’ll also take a critical look at which areas you think we may not be performing in quite as well. We’ll be surveying a different group of OpenDNS users every quarter, so keep your eyes open for an invite in your email. Looking forward to hearing your feedback!