More than 25,000 schools and school districts are using OpenDNS today — including some of the country’s largest — to achieve CIPA compliance, make their networks better performing, save money and keep their kids safe online. We spend a lot of time talking to these customers and often hear questions about how other school districts are using our service. What are they filtering? How did they configure the service? We came to realize that not only is there not a place online for K-12 network admins to talk to each other about OpenDNS, there’s not really a place online for K-12 networks admins to talk to each other, period.

Aiming to provide that place, today we launched the OpenDNS K-12 School forums.

If you’re a network admin for a K-12 school, take a few minutes and check it out. Have a question about using OpenDNS in your state? Curious how your peers at other school districts are using OpenDNS? The new forums are for you. Since each state has its own unique network configurations (some of you get Internet connectivity from a state-run ISP, for example) we created a section for all 50. At very least, drop by to introduce yourself to your peers and say hello.

And if your state doesn’t yet have a moderator, drop us a line and tell us why you’d make a great one.

July means many things to many people, but here at OpenDNS it means just one thing — System Administrator Appreciation Month!

This year we’re throwing a big bash to show our appreciation for you. If you live in the San Francisco area — or want to come to San Francisco for the event — join us at DNA Lounge on Wednesday, July 29. There’ll be good people, good music and good drinks. We even have some surprises for you up our sleeves.

Register for the party here. Admission is free. We hope to see you there!

In parting, thanks to SysAdminDay.com for these words. If they strike home, we really hope to see you in San Francisco:

A sysadmin unpacked the server for this website from its box, installed an operating system, patched it for security, made sure the power and air conditioning was working in the server room, monitored it for stability, set up the software, and kept backups in case anything went wrong. All to serve this webpage.

A sysadmin installed the routers, laid the cables, configured the networks, set up the firewalls, and watched and guided the traffic for each hop of the network that runs over copper, fiber optic glass, and even the air itself to bring the Internet to your computer. All to make sure the webpage found its way from the server to your computer.

A sysadmin makes sure your network connection is safe, secure, open, and working. A sysadmin makes sure your computer is working in a healthy way on a healthy network. A sysadmin takes backups to guard against disaster both human and otherwise, holds the gates against security threats and crackers, and keeps the printers going no matter how many copies of the tax code someone from Accounting prints out.

A sysadmin worries about spam, viruses, spyware, but also power outages, fires and floods.

When the email server goes down at 2 AM on a Sunday, your sysadmin is paged, wakes up, and goes to work.

A sysadmin is a professional, who plans, worries, hacks, fixes, pushes, advocates, protects and creates good computer networks, to get you your data, to help you do work — to bring the potential of computing ever closer to reality.

So if you can read this, thank your sysadmin — and know he or she is only one of dozens or possibly hundreds whose work brings you the email from your aunt on the West Coast, the instant message from your son at college, the free phone call from the friend in Australia, and this [blog].

A few months ago we told you about a major milestone for the Domain Tagging system and the OpenDNS community - an impressive 5 million unique domains submitted into the system. And today I’m excited to tell you about another milestone. We officially now have 1 million domains verified in the system. That means they’ve been submitted, tagged, voted on and confirmed. (This is in addition to the millions of domains in the seven Adult categories from our friends at St. Bernard Software.)

When we introduced you to the Domain Tagging system, which powers our Web content filtering service, we explained it was better than any other filtering system for three reasons:

1. It’s more comprehensive. The system has more than 50,000 people submitting and voting on sites. This is in stark contrast to a mere handful of people employed for this job by security companies offering Web content filtering.

2. It’s faster-moving. New Web sites and changes to existing Web sites are constantly being published to the Internet. Other Web content filtering systems update only once nightly, or even less frequently, and therefore fail to catch and categorize everything right away. The OpenDNS community is always adding and tagging sites, so you benefit from real-time updates.

3. It’s free to use. No longer are you forced to pay top dollar to keep your network safe and secure.

I talk to you, our customers and our community, every day and hear how much you value a Web content filtering system that works reliably and keeps the people on your network safe online. Whether it’s businesses, school districts, Managed Service Providers (MSPs), hospitals or households, everyone appreciates the service our community powers and OpenDNS provides.

In the coming months, we’ll be working be working on improvements to the Domain Tagging System that encourage more voting. Perhaps even some prizes for the most active and accurate voters… But in honor of this milestone, take a few minutes today and vote on some domains.

This week Facebook recommended OpenDNS on its Security Page, the place Facebook users are encouraged to go to learn how to stay safe on Facebook and on the Internet. OpenDNS is recommended because it takes the guesswork out of identifying phishing scams for you. Even if you click a suspicious link sent to you in a message by your Facebook friend, or posted on your wall, we’ll still prevent you from being fooled by showing you a warning. That’s a lot of incentive to use OpenDNS.

Like other social networks, Facebook seems to be working hard to eliminate phishing on its site. The more popular a site becomes, the more phishers are inclined to use it for phishing and saying Facebook has been gaining in popularity as of late is an understatement.

While Facebook has been growing its global user base we’ve been growing ours, and a big part of the reason people choose OpenDNS is our anti-phishing service. PhishTank.com has identified and verified more than 300,000 individual phishing scams, all of which are blocked for our users.

We’re thrilled Facebook recommends our service.

One Web Day is a day in which people around the world make an effort to celebrate the internet, its use in every day life, and raise awareness of its value. The OpenDNS crew spent One Web Day 2008 by volunteering our time in helping Meraki and the city of San Francisco install free wireless internet here in the city. Meraki is leading the way in creating free city-wide wireless internet access in San Francisco, allowing anyone in range of their wireless network known as “Free the Net” to surf the web. Not only do they pride themselves on providing the city with free internet, they are also giving back to the low-income community by providing those people with a free alternative.

Together the volunteers installed wireless access points in more 6 buildings around the Tenderloin district that will give over 1,000 low-income San Franciscans access to the internet. Most of the equipment we installed consists of small repeaters mounted to walls near power sources. Each building has one or two main access points that provide internet access, and these repeaters allow Meraki to spread that signal through many levels of the buildings and even from building to building.

It was great to get the team out of the office and do something really good for the community. We got to meet a lot of amazing people at Meraki and other volunteers who were just as excited to be part of such an awesome movement. I know I can speak for the entire team in saying that we all had a lot of fun yesterday and got a lot more out of the experience than we expected. Both myself and the rest of OpenDNS look forward to taking part in future events like this one!

On behalf of everyone at OpenDNS I’d like to thank Mike McCarthy of the San Francisco Department of Telecommunications and Information Services for helping organize San Francisco’s celebration of One Web Day 2008.