If you’re going to be at the 23rd annual Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference in Baltimore, MD next week — and we know many of you are — pencil us in for a couple things:

First OpenDNS Founder David Ulevitch will be leading a Birds-of-a-Feather session Monday night at 7 pm. The topic is “Best Practices in DNS” and David will discuss the state of the Domain Name System, past and present, benefits of integrating security into DNS, DNSSec and more.

Then at 8 pm on Monday night, join us across the street from the convention hall at James Joyce Pub for a happy hour (or two) hosted by OpenDNS. This is your opportunity to meet David personally and ask any questions you have — about DNS in general, configuring OpenDNS on your network or even who he likes in the World Series.

Both events are not to be missed. RSVP for the happy hour event so we know to expect you. Hope to see you there.

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].

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.

So I flew out to CES for a couple meetings this morning and will be here until tomorrow. If you’re a friend of OpenDNS, are here at CES and want to meet up, give me a call at 415-287-7721 or send me an email david _at_ opendns.com.

For now I’m on the show floor now hanging out and walking around… I’d love to get a chance to meet some of you face-to-face.

There’s a reason we run a ton of servers with a bunch of different Internet providers and put them in a lot of different datacenters. That reason is apparent today as we sit in our shiny new offices in San Francisco and watch the lights flicker on and off.

It seems like the SOMA district of San Francisco has been hit with some power issues and with it a datacenter or two was taken offline. San Francisco blogging juggernaut Scott Beale (and he’s much more than a blogger) already posted about the issue and pointed out that lots of popular internet websites are offline now. The list includes Internet advertising company AdBrite, Craigslist, Netflix, Technorati and SixApart.

For those wondering, OpenDNS is online and fine. Our cache will update if any of these sites move datacenters and quickly change IPs. You can use our CacheCheck tool and see for yourself.

And I guess the real point of this post is to say that if you can’t reach some popular Internet sites right now, that’s why. Nothing to do with us.

Update: looks like everyone has recovered, mostly. Glad to see it. 5:15pm Pacific Time