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.

Have we mentioned how much we love SysAdmins here at OpenDNS? Not only do we love them, but we spend a good amount of our time thinking about how we can make their lives better and their jobs easier. Because after all, being a SysAdmin is a thankless job – it’s often not until something goes wrong that a SysAdmin is acknowledged and appreciated.

To celebrate our favorite unsung heroes, OpenDNS is announcing the fifth annual OpenDNS SysAdmin Awards, the only awards contest that honors only SysAdmins and the great work they do that everyone benefits from. This is your place to acknowledge the SysAdmin, network operator or IT person in your office, a SysAdmin you know or even yourself.

There are six categories, and from all of the submissions in the six categories we’ll select one individual for the crown honor: 2011 OpenDNS SysAdmin of the Year. Last year’s submission count was unprecedented and we look forward to better this year.

Without further ado, here are the six categories, plus what our judging panel — consisting of the OpenDNS operations team (which includes OpenDNS CEO David Ulevitch) — will be looking for in each category.

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. If it involved you holding servers over your head in rising flood waters while you are wearing a snorkel, you would be a great candidate for this category.

Neat Freak Award

SysAdmins take pride in documentation and organization of cabling, wiring and racks. Wow the judges in this category with photographic evidence showing that your SysAdmin takes their wiring and racking work seriously and 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. We respect the fact that you had to string fiber between buildings with a frisbee because you had no budget to trench across the street.

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.). Note, if you are the chief architect behind AWS and you are submitted as a candidate you will win this award.

DevOps Award

Often, the most successful SysAdmins are the ones who can write code and work well with others. OpenDNS and other large Internet sites 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. Hint: The more detail in the submission the better.

Winners will be announced here on this blog, and all will receive a gift package from OpenDNS full of awesome goodies. Winners will also be VIP invited guests at the 5th Annual SysAdmin Appreciation Party in San Francisco on July 28, 2011 (more details forthcoming). Deadline for entry is midnight July 12, 2011.

Happy hacking and good luck!

We’re looking for a junior programmer to join our global operations team.

The person for this job wants to become a master at system and network operations. You are the kind of programmer who codes to make their life easier. You are the software engineer who longs to leave the monotony of application writing and join the ranks of hackers turned infrastructure architects. You will still code but we’ll teach you the art of systems and network administration.

We will teach you how to manage BGP in multiple sites with finesse. You will learn how to automate routing table analysis to help us make decisions on what datacenters we should expand into so we can better serve our customers. You will help perform security audits at all levels and work on custom tools that measure performance and take actions to improve the quality of service we provide to our customers.

You need to have a desire to run a production network. This job is one where we take calculated steps to ensure we operate the most advanced DNS network in the world.

Read more via my post on Craigslist.

There’s an opportunity for software developers of Dynamic DNS clients. We’d like to help promote your software, as soon as it meets these two requirements:

• Support Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for HTTPS updates
• Allow the user to change the Dynamic DNS update URL to the OpenDNS update URL

If your software supports those two requirements, we’re quite happy to list it as an option for OpenDNS customers and help you get more users for your software, whether it’s commercial, freeware, or anywhere in between.

Background

With last week’s introduction of OpenDNS Accounts, OpenDNS supports DNS preferences and statistics for users with dynamic IP addresses through Dynamic DNS. There are many, many individuals with dynamic IP addresses, so we know this step opens up our service dramatically.

Dynamic DNS (DDNS) requires running client software on your computer, as described in the DDNS instructions. Right now, OpenDNS offers working client software that’s only for the technically savvy. The software is a modification of the open-source command line client inadyn by OpenDNS to support Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), if you’re curious.

We’re not client software developers. The only reason we released anything was because the clients we found either did not support SSL or would not let you (the customer) change the DDNS update URL to the OpenDNS update URL, as listed on the OpenDNS DDNS instructions page.

The good news? There is already a vibrant ecosystem of DDNS client software. However, we didn’t find anything that met both of our requirements just yet. The closest one was DynSite, a Windows client which supports SSL, but doesn’t support OpenDNS’s update URL.

If we missed a working candidate, let us know!

Next steps

If you’re a developer of DDNS client software, please get in touch. We’d like to help or answer questions as best we can.

If you’re already using DDNS client software and would like to use the same software for managing your OpenDNS Account (makes sense to me!), then please ask the developer (politely) if adding SSL support and OpenDNS update URL support (or just allowing update URL choice) is on their radar.

Reminder

You can use OpenDNS without an account if speedy, reliable DNS with the default preferences is what you need.

Update: While we encourage people to write code using the PhishTank API, this specific offer is no longer valid.

We’re looking for someone to write some sample (but working) code to help test an anti-phishing database API we’ve developed and are about to release for public use (for free!). We are busy working on a ton of projects right now and rather than divert our attention to writing plugins and extensions for apps we aren’t familiar with we figured we could pay one or two of you to do it for us instead. The code will be licensed under an open-source approved license, probably the Mozilla license, or something even more open. We basically just want our API to have some example implementations when we launch it next week.

Here’s the problem: time is of the essence! We want to have something ready to go public October 2nd, which means we really want to see a test version by Friday, September 29th. This will give us enough time to work out any bugs (in your code or our API) by the morning of Monday, October 2nd. That’s only a week from today (yikes!).

I want to offer some good incentives for you, especially since time is short. Feel free to pick some or all of the following:

• $300 for a Thunderbird extension which scans an email for URLs and checks them against our API and optionally submits suspected URLs from phishing emails into our API.
• $100 for a SpamAssassin plugin which just scans an email for URLs and checks them against our API
• $100 for another equally as cool open source project like Squid Cache, per our approval via email.
• A free lunch w/ our CEO at a good restaurant if you’re willing to come into San Francisco to have it. Our CEO (me) has good taste and gets to decide what a ‘good restaurant’ is, but it’ll be good.
• A blog post saying how much you rock.
• If you really are good, we are hiring and this is a fast-track way to get through the interview process.

Since you will be one of the first to use our API it might require some back and forth with us as we tune our API. It would help if you used Yahoo IM or AIM and spoke English. Other than that, we are pretty flexible about who you are. We posted a listing at RentACoder for a Thunderbird hacker but haven’t had any bites yet which is why we’re posting here. Unless you hear from us directly (John Roberts or myself) that you are hired, we make no guarantees.

You can post general questions here on the blog but specific questions should be sent to us via email (firstname at opendns dot com will get to John or myself).

We want some (seriously elite) PHP / MySQL hackers to join our team in San Francisco.

If you think that making the Internet better and developing real technology (meaning we’re not building AJAX’d out social-networking services over IM) meshes well with you, and you have the PHP / MySQL skills to contribute, then let us know.

Below is a brief rundown of what we’re looking for but you’ll find a more detailed list on our Craigslist posting. Note, the Craigslist posting is for someone more senior but we’re also hiring for a junior PHP / MySQL programming position.

Requirements:

• Knowledge of Computer Science and fundamental algorithms, ability to write well structured and readable code
• Extensive knowledge of PHP, including PHP 5
• Strong knowledge of MySQL with an understanding of the impacts of indexing and schema design along with query analysis and optimization.
• Knowledge of HTML and CSS, ability to develop web pages by writing HTML directly; knowledge of XML extremely helpful.
• Linux knowledge, understanding of how Apache works, and a good familiarity with the shell environment.
• Prior C experience

Bonus Points:

• Serious knowledge of MySQL including but not limited to complex joins, subqueries, stored procedures, etc.
• Experience developing php extensions (PECL modules) in C
• Ability to write and understand JavaScript.
• Previous use of CVS or Subversion for code management and versioning.
• Familiarity with DNS.
• Involvement in any Free or Open Source software projects.

You can send resumes to team (at) opendns _dot_ com.

ps: If you just got out of college with your freshly minted CS degree but don’t have a lot of experience you should still send us an email. You’ll learn more at OpenDNS about software and global deployments than you will ever learn at that boat anchor in Redmond.

Update: The position has been filled! Thanks for sending in all the resumes. Good to know lots of folks love Debian as much as we do.

Think you’re elite? Come work with some multi-talented and brilliant folks as our new Systems Administrator.

We’re looking for a really strong Debian Administrator. (in San Francisco)

I put up a post on craigslist.org today with a specific job description but I wanted to get the word out to our users who might be a good fit or know someone who is.

We run a very cool globally distributed network that’s built on Debian Linux so the person we’re looking for should have experience rolling their own packages, running their own apt repositories in addition to being a straight-up unix command-line ninja. Experience with FreeBSD and some networking understanding really helps in this job, too.

You might be wondering why we don’t have one right now and the reason is that I (yeah, a CEO with kung-fu like ops chops), along with some of the developers, all have seasoned skills in the systems and networking area. But that’s going to change when we hire you, it’s time to hand over the reins to someone dedicated to operations full time.

Sometimes people in this kind of position worry that if they do such a good job they’ll be fired because nothing ever goes wrong and it looks like they don’t do anything. That won’t happen here, we all know what it takes to be a really good operations leader.

If you’re interested in this position, just send us all a note at team (at) opendns (dot) com