See the new tab up there, at the far right? It says My Account. Go ahead and take a look. Or read on for why you’ll want to create a free account. You can find the tab and Sign In link at the upper right of every page of the OpenDNS website.

OpenDNS invited the public to use its free, reliable DNS service for the first time on July 10, 2006. Less than a week later, we introduced preferences for OpenDNS, which gave the individual user the opportunity to manage their DNS in a way that had never before been possible. Later, at customer request, we used our platform to offer choice in their response to Cameroon’s TLD policies.

OpenDNS Accounts represents the next step in our commitment to give our customers choice and control.

We talk a lot about “Safer, Faster and Smarter” DNS built on a rock-solid and reliable foundation. A big part of being safer and smarter means giving you control. That’s what OpenDNS Accounts is all about.

When was the last time your DNS improved?

It doesn’t matter if you have one IP at home that you manage or a massive network of disconnected offices — OpenDNS Accounts is for you.

Secure
Registration, sign in, and all profile and preferences are managed with a username and password on a secure, encrypted site using SSL (like your bank does).

Dynamic DNS Support
OpenDNS Accounts support the use of dynamic DNS (DDNS) update mechanisms to allow you to securely manage your Account and get your preferences even with a dynamic IP address. Read for details. Note: Because OpenDNS uses SSL, there are several very good DDNS clients which do not (yet) work. We are going to encourage various developers to add support for SSL to their otherwise very strong DDNS software.

Statistics
Everyone from individuals to network operators will enjoy a bit of insight into statistics about their DNS usage. How many DNS requests per day do you make? How many individual domains per day do you resolve? On that pretty graph I see for the OpenDNS service, what am I contributing? Basically, we’re taking the stats we show the public and giving you similar insight with the stats that relate to your DNS traffic.

Just as a heads up — while DNS resolution is blinding fast (as always), our stats processing happens (as our network guys say) out-of-band and is done separately. You will not see statistics immediately (at least, not just yet). It may take as long as 48 hours for your stats to appear.

We feel strongly that this is a platform for DNS unlike anything that has ever existed before and continues to help OpenDNS bring about evolutionary changes to the DNS that dramatically change the end-user experience.

P.S. If you have OpenDNS preferences, they will continue to work until they are superseded by an OpenDNS Account with the same IP address. We suggest that anyone using OpenDNS preferences set up a free account now and verify your IP address.

My cousin was one of the many people to send me a link to David Pogue’s blog post at the New York Times titled “A Faster Web–for Free” about OpenDNS and how much he and his wife love it. That’s just awesome!

For those of you who don’t know, David Pogue is the consumer technology superhero for the non-geek population. In addition to his usual column he also does a bunch of really great video podcasts that you can watch.

Pogue writes in his column:

“In short, Open DNS works by caching Web-page requests from its thousands of users, so that the site you want is blasted to you in a fraction of a second.”

Just to clarify, we cache the DNS requests only. DNS is the part of a web request where your computer says “how do I get to site xyz.com?” DNS is a significant part of the latency in your web experience and that’s where a large part of the speedup comes from but we don’t actually cache web pages from other sites.

Sometimes, when it's late at night in the office, we notice odd things in the DNS that don't belong. Sometimes they're worthy of a blog mention. Tonight we highlight a myspace.com DNS misconfiguration.

---

$ host -vv myspace.com
Trying "myspace.com"
;; ->>HEADER< <- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 24145
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;myspace.com. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 216.178.32.51
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 216.178.32.50
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 216.178.32.49
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 216.178.32.48
myspace.com. 68350 IN A 127.0.0.1

Received 109 bytes from 208.67.222.222#53 in 9 ms

---

For those of you who don't know, 127.0.0.1 is another way of saying localhost which is another way of saying your computer. So while that may literally take me to My Space (as in, my personal computer), it is certainly not going to get me to the website myspace.com. Whoops.

Cameroon is at it again, wildcarding all of the .cm namespace so they can put advertisements up when you typo .com domains like http://www.google.cm. Since August 9, OpenDNS users have had the option to undo this change and decide how they want it handled. There is an option on our preferences page where you can decide how you want this dealt with for your computer or network.

As a reminder, if you do turn on .cm to .com wildcard filtering, all real .cm domains will still work!. That includes domains like airfrance.cm and others that we listed.

We don’t know why Cameroon (or its operator) is flip-flopping on this one, but I’d encourage you to turn this preference on and leave it on.

CNET just rehashed a report (pdf of report) that our friends over at Nominum commissioned to look at the speed and reliability of ISP DNS servers. The verdict won’t shock any of you: ISPs are pretty bad at providing DNS.

Some of the numbers they put in the report are surprising. The report says that Verizon drops 3.14% of all DSL subscribers’ DNS requests. That is some messed up DNS!

The report goes on to talk about other ISPs including SBC, RoadRunner, Comcast, who all do relatively poor jobs at providing such a critical service. I’m bummed they didn’t review Speakeasy, an ISP I’ve always really liked and whose DNS servers have always performed reasonably. The report states that Comcast only drops 0.51% of queries which is amusing because most people tend to attribute bad DNS service with Comcast. We know that the reliability of the DNS is important and we keep our system reliability statistics totally open and accessible. I challenge Verizon or Comcast to do the same.

What’s the point of all this? This report really shows that there is a lot of room for improvement in the DNS space and it clearly starts with reliability and performance, two things we cover well. Reporters still don’t understand the importance of DNS because it’s much more than just about speed. That’s one important part but the other is that DNS is a major part of the Internet and just like there are firewalls and anti-spam solutions, users needs tools to manage their DNS too.

Bringing this issue to light is a good thing. Even though we didn’t pay for or commission this report, I can’t help to think it was made to open ISPs’ eyes to our service. We’ve created an opportunity for ISPs where there was none before. OpenDNS provides these kinds of tools to users.

As much as I would love an ISP like Verizon to work with OpenDNS to make their users’ Internet better I would be upset if it was done arbitrarily and not on an opt-in basis. If I were a Verizon user currently using their three-percent-query-dropping DNS I’d switch to OpenDNS in a heartbeat. It’s easy to get started with OpenDNS right now.