Yesterday Google announced it’s providing WiFi free of charge to 47 airports across the country during the holiday season. (A full list of the airports is here.) Because we’re also starting to feel the spirit of the season, today we invite all 47 airports to take us up on a special offer to use OpenDNS on the WiFi free of charge.

Now that the WiFi is in effect, we want to make it easy for the 47 airports to make it safe for the millions of travelers who’ll pass through the airports this holiday season. OpenDNS is the single easiest way to keep travelers safe from phishing attempts, taking the guesswork out of identifying the fraudulent sites for them. We have several versions of OpenDNS so we’ll work with the airports to get them the one that’s best for their network and needs.

Network admins at the participating airports: all you have to do is drop us a line at airportwifi @ opendns.com. We look forward to hearing from 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.

A month ago we gave you a sneak peek at the newest members of the OpenDNS family – OpenDNS Deluxe and OpenDNS Enterprise. Feedback since then has been phenomenal and so many of you are interested in the new, more feature-rich services.

We’re hosting a webinar next week on Wednesday, October 21 at 10 am PST to give you all of the details about what the new services will include. OpenDNS Founder David Ulevitch will host with a special guest from Nvidia, one of the first companies to deploy OpenDNS Enterprise. In the webinar we’ll:

• Go feature-by-feature over the new services.
• Give you a snapshot of the main differences between the new services and the free service you use and love today.

We know you’re busy, so like all of our webinars, we’ll keep this one to just 30 minutes.

Sign up here.

Today is a big day for OpenDNS. I’m thrilled to tell you we’ve listened to your feedback and are giving you what you want: two new versions of OpenDNS designed to meet the unique needs of professional users and businesses of all sizes.

OpenDNS has had tremendous success in our quest to improve the Internet since we launched the service three years ago — To make it safer, faster, smarter and more reliable. Our users come from all over the world and reflect a diverse set of people. Our users have homes with children, they’re some of the country’s largest school districts - Baltimore and Detroit public school systems to name a few - and they’re businesses of all sizes, from mom and pop shops to some of the world’s most trusted, global brands.

On the consumer front, we are seeing more and more users start using our service through our fantastic partners like NETGEAR and we’ve also just released a new OpenDNS Dynamic Updater client to help make it easier to ensure you are using OpenDNS at all times.

But there are some features that businesses need that aren’t included in the classic version of OpenDNS you are using today. And that’s where OpenDNS Deluxe and OpenDNS Enterprise come in. The new services have features that are tailored for both a savvier “prosumer” customer as well as larger businesses. They include a wide variety of customizations and new features that help us better integrate into more complex networks and organizations. And, they come with one of our most requested “features,” the option to easily remove the advertisements (and wildcard NXDOMAIN) from the OpenDNS experience. An option that fits in with our goal of providing people the best DNS experience possible, however they choose to configure and experience it.

Here at OpenDNS headquarters in San Francisco the entire engineering team is working in some capacity on making these services great, while working on making our classic service even better. In fact, we’ve built out even more infrastructure and more capacity, something that will benefit everyone using OpenDNS as a whole.

Today, we have 25 customers currently using our new services in Early Access, and the services will be Generally Available to anyone later this year.

I personally invite anyone who’s interested in the new service to apply for Early Access by filling out a form we’ve put online here.

Feedback welcomed in the comments, as always.

Two weeks ago I was in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, doing an installation and am happy to report that as of today, that site is online and serving production OpenDNS traffic.

One of the neat things about OpenDNS is that we use something called Anycast technology in how we run our network. That’s great for you — it means no matter where you are in the world, your DNS requests route through our closest datacenter. When we do maintenance, our routing topology ensures you will route to our next closest datacenter. It also means that when we bring up a new datacenter that is closer to you, your DNS requests will go to it.

And here’s a photo of what our installation looks like:

From top to bottom we have:

• Operations machine for management
• Juniper MX480 Router
• Cisco 2950 Switch for management
• 3 SuperMicro Twin2U Servers (each with four servers in a single chassis)

This is a fairly typical setup for us. We have lots of room to add more servers as needed (though we think the 12 we have will be plenty for quite a while). We’re happy to answer questions, so please feel free to ask ‘em. You can see more pics of our setup here: OpenDNS in Amsterdam