Technology user groups are awesome. That’s why OpenDNS is announcing a new program dedicated to celebrating the innovation and education taking place at user groups everywhere, and making life a little more delicious for their members. Even though programmers, engineers, IT professionals and SysAdmins are notoriously over worked and under appreciated, many still somehow find time to gather together, share insight and explore new tech tips on a regular basis. There are thousands of user groups around the world that are independently organized and run where people join to share hard-won knowledge and experiences and have a blast doing it.

Each month, OpenDNS wants to buy dinner for a different user group that’s focused on technology. It makes no difference to us whether your group discusses hardware or hacking, speaks JAVA, PHP or Ruby, prefers servers or the cloud, or is a Mac or a PC (or Linux/Unix/Other for that matter). All we care about is that you’re well-fed while you’re talking tech and that you’ve got plenty of caffeine to keep the discussions lively. And, we’ll provide plenty of sought-after OpenDNS stickers to pass around and a few t-shirts to give away!

If you’d like OpenDNS to help feed the hungry crew at your next meeting, just give us the basic details - how often you meet, how many members, focus for the group, helpful links, etc. – and we’ll take care of the rest. In addition to providing some hearty chow, we also want to feature your user group in an upcoming issue of the OpenDNS newsletter, so we can highlight your awesomeness for the masses. This is your chance to share details of your group with millions of OpenDNS users so go ahead and boast.

At OpenDNS, we think the SysAdmins and IT pros are the real unsung heroes. Even though you spend every day quietly averting disaster and keeping the network up and running, it’s not often you get the recognition you deserve. As you’ve probably learned from recent blog posts, the OpenDNS offices have been buzzing with projects meant to help us, and people around the world, celebrate SysAdmins.

We’re making it our priority for the entire month of July to celebrate SysAdmins everywhere! That’s why we’re not only throwing an epic bash in downtown San Francisco to celebrate SysAdmins, we’re also reminding bosses that come July 29 you deserve some special (and preferably caffeinated) recognition.

How the OpenDNS Boss Reminder Service works: Sending your boss a reminder is easy and they’ll never know you were the one who tipped us off. Simply fill out the form with your details and your boss’ name and email* and we’ll take care of the rest. A few days before the July 29 holiday your boss will receive an email that looks like this:

*Don’t worry. We won’t email you or your boss for anything except the friendly reminder service.

Join our free webinar, focused exclusively on our rock-solid, best-in-class malware protection this Thursday, July 14th, at 11am PT, and learn how OpenDNS can secure your network from malware and botnets once and for all.

Two weeks ago, we unveiled major improvements to our malware blocking.  In addition to blocking malicious hostnames, we now block hostnames that resolve to known malicious IP addresses. That’s a big step forward, and an industry first.

Hear from the expert: David Ulevitch, our founder and CEO, will spend a snappy thirty minutes detailing, first, the threat malware presents to organizations, and, second, how our improved malware protection can cut malware off at the knees and block command and control communication. Effectively, this renders malware harmless to your network, and secures every device, from laptops to smartphones to tablets, used by your employees. Have specific questions about how our malware protection works? This is your opportunity to get answers.

Date: Thursday, July 14

Time: 11 AM PDT to 11:30 AM PDT

Don’t miss out. Sign up now, and don’t forget to invite your colleagues.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Next week, SysAdmins from around the country will be heading to San Jose, Calif., for the 24th annual Large Installation System Administration conference — and so will OpenDNS!

First, OpenDNS Founder David Ulevitch will be leading a Birds-of-a-Feather session Monday night, Nov. 8 at 7 p.m. He’ll be talking about how to build, deploy and manage a global DNS service, based on our experiences doing just that. His presentation will include time for Q&A and discussion.

Immediately following the talk, we’ll be heading over as a group Gordon Biersch on 33 East San Fernando Street in San Jose (it’s a quick walk from the conference). From 8–10 p.m., enjoy drinks and appetizers — on us! This is your opportunity to meet David personally and ask any questions you have — about DNS in general, setting up OpenDNS on your network or where our next datacenter will be. Please RSVP for the happy hour so we know how many people to plan for. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Today marks the first day of National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM). Initiated by the Department of Homeland Security in 2004, NCSAM is an opportunity for each of us to take a look at how we protect ourselves, our offices, our schools and our families online. We’re longtime supporters of NCSAM: In conjunction with National Cyber Security Awareness Month 2006, we launched PhishTank, the largest community clearinghouse of phishing data online — today it’s being used to block 1 million phishing attempts per month.

Since you’re using OpenDNS, you’re already doing one of the best things you can do to protect yourself and everyone on your network. OpenDNS blocks phishing sites, protects you from malware (like last year’s Conficker virus) and gives you comprehensive Web content filtering options, three things that already put you ahead of the curve.

As part of NCSAM, every day for the next 31 days, we’ll be tweeting out an actionable security tip from our Twitter account with the hashtag #NCSAM. Tips will range from the simplest, most basic suggestions to more advanced options. We also want to hear your best cyber security tips! Reply at us on Twitter with your ideas, tips and best practices for online safety.

The nominations have been submitted, the votes have been tallied, and our esteemed panel of judges have deliberated for hours. The results? We’re excited to give SysAdmin of the Year honors to Paul Dobbs.

What makes Paul worthy of the prize? He works at the John Howard Society of Durham Region, a nonprofit in Ontario Canada that provides services to nearly 20,000 people per year — and he has a budget of zero dollars per year. Without any annual budget, Paul has increased technology access from 45 computers to nearly 200 computers, from one old NT server to six 2003-R2 servers, unified the network between all offices and reduced Internet costs by more than $6,000 per year.

As Paul has gotten JHS new equipment through grants and funding proposals, he’s put the organization in a position where it can actually give computers away to others; it now donates complete systems to JHS clients who have no financial resources to buy their own.

Paul isn’t the only winner though; here are the other talented award winners:

K-12 Award: In addition to managing a network of 700 computers, Saint Francis High School’s Larry Steinke has also made the entire campus wireless, set up Saint Frances on VOIP phones, installed Smartboards and created a technology committee to review and establish IT plans. Myron Nessan, Saint Francis’ director of finance, says “he does all this with great personality, professionalism and purpose which is appreciated by all he works with.”

DevOps Award: The award for DevOps excellence goes to R.I. Pienaar. He wrote mcollective, a distributed sysadmin framework, runs DevOps meetings in London and is a great contributor to Puppet.

Flying Solo Award: Not too many SysAdmins can say their work saves lives, but Espen Ødegaard can. When the Conficker worm attacked all the workstations as the hospital he worked at, Ødegaard worked tirelessly for three days — by himself — to clean up every workstation. “It is not unlikely that his efforts saved lives,” wrote nominator Odd Henriksen, “considering how little information medical personnel had on their patients while their computers were down.”

Shoestring Budget Award: Alec Cedrone, manager of information systems at Weston Nurseries has saved money on everything from installing Ubiquti Bullet2MP himself to looking to liquidated purchasing options, to choosing OpenDNS for Web content filtering. He estimates his thrifty ways have saved the company almost $35,000.

Neat Freak Award: Given to Kris Wessels, a SysAdmin in the department of computer science at K.U. Leuven in Belgium. Complete photographic evidence of his cabling prowess can be found here.

Disaster Response: While taking a long awaited vacation, Matt Sokolow was texted by his boss. There was no Internet connectivity, no network connectivity at the office — nothing was working. Matt wins the disaster response award for spending three plus hours while on vacation on the phone with a general manager, walking her through everything from restarting a DHCP server to reading error logs to restoring from a backup.

Large Scale Deployment Award: When Dale Hobbs, network administrator for Lush Cosmetics, began to investigate what employees at Lush’s retail stores were looking at online, he realized the bulk of their web traffic was to non work-related sites. The solution was to deploy OpenDNS — at 149 retail locations across the country. The results? A boost in employee productivity, cost savings for the company, and being given the Large Scale Deployment Award.

Paul will receive a pass to The USENIX Association’s 24th Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA ’10) — valued at approximately $900 — and the other award winners will all be given a $50 cash prize. Special appreciation to our friends at The USENIX Association for providing the grand prize!

Thanks to all who entered and we hope to see you on July 28th at the System Administrator Appreciation Party!

Here at OpenDNS we’re all about the SysAdmins. While we’ve made it our mission to ease their lives, we also look for ways to thank them for keeping our networks up and running. One way we do that is by celebrating System Administrator Appreciation Month (July) with all of the related events we put on, including the party (details coming soon – it’s gonna be good this year!).

To kick things off early, today I’m excited to announce the 2010 System Administrator of the Year Awards, the largest contest of its kind and the best way to give a SysAdmin that you respect the cred they deserve. There will be one winner selected in each category by a panel of esteemed judges, including OpenDNS System Administration team members George Patterson and Mack Nagashima, and CEO (and occasional SysAdmin himself) David Ulevitch. Winners in each category will receive a prize of $50, and from all entries the judging committee will choose one winner that stands out among the rest as the official OpenDNS SysAdmin of the Year. We’re still working on details for the Grand Prize, but we aim to please.

The deadline for entries is midnight June 29. Winners will be announced shortly thereafter.

Without further ado, the categories:

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.

Neat Freak Award

SysAdmins take pride in documentation and organization of cabling, wiring and racks. Wow the judges in this category with photo evidence showing that your SysAdmin 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.

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.).

DevOps Award

Often, the most successful SysAdmins are the ones who work well with others. Large websites 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.

Good luck to all! We’re rooting for you!

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.