In that spirit, I got to thinking about all the ways we’ve been working to make OpenDNS easier for you and yours to use. OpenDNS is really a service every network should be running, regardless of how large or small your network is. So this goodiebag of helpful tools has something for everyone — from households to schools to large, global enterprises. We’ll keep thinking up more ways to make OpenDNS better, but as always, if you have suggestions I encourage you to submit them at Idea Bank, post to the Forums or email me directly at allison at opendns dot com.

1. A brand new video tutorial. This is a biggie, and something we’ve wanted to do for a long time. OpenDNS is not always the easiest thing to explain. All Internet users relate to the frustration of unreliable Internet and slow page-load times, and see the value of free Web content filtering. When we say OpenDNS is a service that’ll make your Internet safer, faster, smarter and more reliable, free, everyone wants it. But the setting up part — the finding your DNS settings and swapping your ISP’s IP addresses for OpenDNS’s — sometimes presents a challenge. The video tutorial walks you through the entire process in under 5 minutes.

2. Schedule a Demo // Request References services. This one is not new, necessarily, but since we’ve never really called your attention to it, I figured now’s as good a time as any. The Schedule a Demo and Request References were really designed with larger organizations in mind. We’ve learned that when you guys make a decision about using a new technology on your network, there are often lots of different folks involved in the decision making process. Sometimes there’s even paperwork that needs to be filled out, and calls that need to be made to existing, happy users of the service in question. Scheduling a demo couldn’t be easier. Just tell us a bit about you and your organization to prepare the OpenDNS rep who’ll do the demoing. Invite coworkers and get all of your questions answered on one snappy call. Same thing for requesting references. We’ll match you with an organization that’s similiar to yours. Have you seen how many happy customers we have?

3. Expanded router selection. We’re always working to keep our selection of routers in the instructions updated, but recently we went big and added several. Today we offer instructions for 16 different router manufacturers from the well-known Linksys, NETGEAR and D-Links to some more rare models. The goal is to have every router represented, to make it as easy as possible for everyone to set up OpenDNS, so look for us to continue adding to our gallery.

Happy holidays, everyone.

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.

MikeD (check out his badge)

Richard, MikeD and I went down to Yahoo this past Friday to participate in their second Hack Day event. Yahoo opens their campus to outside developers on Hack Day for a 36-hour stretch of coding, technical talks, music and fun. It was an amazing event attended by hundreds of developers that banded together to produce 47 hacks by Saturday afternoon. There was even a live performance by Girl Talk on Friday night. I didn’t stay overnight to hack like MikeD and Richard did (more on their awesome hacks in a moment), but I left Friday evening feeling more excited about what Yahoo is doing than I’ve ever felt before.

As many of you know, we work closely with Yahoo to deliver the best search results and ads possible on the OpenDNS Guide. As a company focused on helping people navigate the Internet, we felt strongly early on that it would make no sense for us to build a search service ourselves. Partnering with Yahoo for our search and advertising has been a great move. The quality of the Yahoo Developer Network Search API has has continued to impress and now we’re excited to get involved with the next iteration: Yahoo Search BOSS.

BOSS is the future of Yahoo’s search API, allowing developers to manipulate the results and Yahoo’s index directly. MikeD converted our existing Guide from a PHP application that proxied results from YDN Search to a static Guide that speaks to BOSS directly from your browser. By the early morning hours and thanks in part to the YUI JavaScript library, MikeD had built a prototype of our new Guide.

MikeD was able to get Richard to help with the HTML and CSS before presenting his hack to all the judges and developers. Their hard work paid off and MikeD came away with three awards from the competition! He won the Yahoo BOSS award, third place from the YUI group and the overall Bleeding Purple Award for the hack that screamed “Yahoo!” the loudest (figuratively). For those who don’t know, purple is Yahoo’s color of choice. Richard also made a sweet hack creating a geotagging extension to the Flickr Uploadr (which he also wrote) called Dopploadr that uses data from Dopplr to automatically geotag your photos that are uploaded via the Flickr Uploadr.

I’m proud of what these guys accomplished and I’m excited about what Yahoo is doing. We’ll be working on rolling out MikeD’s new code over the coming weeks as we get various issues sorted out and the “OK” from Yahoo to switch all our traffic over. Hack Day was a fantastic event and I’m glad I was able to be there. I should also mention that if you want to join our team, we’re currently hiring great engineers.

Since we launched OpenDNS over two years ago we’ve learned a lot from our users. That’s largely because it’s no secret that we’re huge fans of feedback. There are two pieces of feedback about our website that we receive most often.

1. People love the signature OpenDNS look and feel. We consistently hear this bit of positive feedback from our customers and our friends at other Internet companies. We knew that as our website matured we had to keep it true to its roots.
2. People say they find our message to be a bit confusing. This is because our service appeals equally to parents at home as it does to network administrators at large companies. We’re too technical for the parents who want a safer Internet — and we aren’t technical enough for the IT guy who wants to know how it works.

To fix this we realized that we need to talk differently to our different audiences. This seemed unintuitive to us at first, but over time it began to make sense. While our service is the same for everyone, the benefits of OpenDNS are different to different people. Our goals for this new site were to better recognize the different audiences who use OpenDNS and explain our benefits to them more clearly without losing the simplicity of our old site.

We hope you will browse around and let us know what you think.

PS: There is a ton of new copy, so if you find any typos or grammar mistakes please tell us about them and we’ll send out some t-shirts to our best copy editors. I’m looking at you, mom.

Since OpenDNS’s servers are not vulnerable - never were vulnerable, actually - lots of you switched to OpenDNS. That’s the second good thing. OpenDNS is absolutely the most secure DNS service available and the more SysAdmins who choose to use the service, the safer and more secure the entire Internet will be. We want to welcome all of you new OpenDNS users and say thanks for making the switch. You’ve made a good call and we’ll continue to work hard to ensure you enjoy our great service for years to come.

Since you’ve now seen the benefits of OpenDNS, we’d like to invite you to pay it forward by telling other SysAdmins and Internet users about OpenDNS. Please take a minute and use this form to tell your friends and colleagues about the benefits of making the switch. They’ll think you’re super smart for knowing about such a great service, and surely thank you.

Now, all of you new users: Check out this Getting Started task list. OpenDNS is a powerful service will all sorts of awesome features. Have you done all of the items below yet?

- Add a logo and custom message. We let you put your logo and message on the OpenDNS Guide and block pages. You can switch it up and put different messages in different places, where appropriate.

- Set up Shortcuts. No matter if you’re at home or at a large corporation, you can put Shortcuts to great use. They’re like AOL Keywords, but you control them, they’ll work across your entire network and they’re browser-independent.

- Set up Web content filtering. You’ll see in your account that OpenDNS has more than 50 categories to choose from. No appliance necessary and your filtering preferences will take effect in just a few minutes.

There are several more advanced features, too. Poke around in your Dashboard to see all that OpenDNS has to offer.

Again, welcome from the entire OpenDNS team.

We asked you all to nominate the SysAdmin in your life who stands out as exceptional. We had so many fantastic nominations to choose from, but after an intense review session our judging team of David Ulevitch, Jesse Davidson, Bill Fumerola and George Patterson came to an agreement. Winners in each category will received a $50 AmEx gift card and the SysAdmin of the year gets $200 and a gift package of OpenDNS schwag. Without further ado, the winners are:

Best Disaster Response Award

Winner: Sean Harrington, SysAdmin for Telford Group
Nominated by: Justin Mecham

Justin says: “Our company has two facilities located at an International Airport. There is an inconvenient runway in between the facilities. To communicate between the buildings a Point to Point Wireless bridge was put in place. The furthest facility’s LAN and WAN connections were routed over the bridge. During one thunderstorm a lighting strike hit a nearby utility pole and leapt to our antenna in its search for ground. This completely incapacitated the PTP Wireless bridge since the antenna wire now had large holes burnt in it.

When this happened our Systems Administrator was in his second week and the boss (i.e. the rest of the IT department) was on a business trip and out of communication. Within the first hour the extent of damage was determined and a vendor was brought in to make a repair. Unfortunately, the equipment was rather old and parts could not be acquired to repair it, nor would he have wanted to since it was only 3Mbps. It was going to take a week to get the parts in and the devices reinstalled.

Within the second hour management was notified, a budget was created, and a communication plan was drafted. All information was to be routed through a few key individuals to keep himself free to find solutions. A makeshift call center was created in the IT office and conference rooms. A representative from each department was setup with a computer. The sales guy would create quotes and process orders, the shipping guy would search for locations in inventory and process pick tickets, and so on and so forth. Phone lines were cleared and designated for this inter site communication. A typical part being sold would take three phone calls to three different people, but within two hours parts and maintenance were moving again. Sean was using these people as a Quasi-Modem TM – Patent Pending.

Sean made it a point to update management twice a day on progress and ensured the vendors were making progress in getting the new equipment. The event happened on a Tuesday and by Friday afternoon everything was up and running. Not only that but the network was running faster at 11Mpbs. While business for the 50 employees in the remote facility certainly was a little slower and a lot more tedious things continued to operate. The IT Manger returned to find his network running better than it ever had.

Since the incident Sean has become the IT Manager for our company. One of the biggest changes he has made since the incident was negotiating a deal with a local carrier for Dark Fiber so that facilities would not have to worry about a similar event. The wireless still sits on the roof just in case a dump truck takes out a utility pole.”

Unbelievable Uptime Award

Winner: Tom Scholl, Jack of All Trades on a major global backbone
Nominated by: His friends

TSERV2.XXXXXX uptime is 8 years, 36 weeks, 1 day, 31 minutes
System restarted by power-on at 20:56:30 UTC Wed Nov 17 1999
System image file is "flash:XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX", booted via flash

Tom says: “The above device is a Cisco router that is acting as a terminal server. Its role is to provide out-of-band CLI connectivity to servers and routers. Over time, at least two ports on its console cable have gone bad. Obviously, we have a good power infrastructure where that device is located. Yes, it is running older code but it hasn’t ran into any problems for awhile. At least two other terminal servers are exhibiting uptimes of at least 8 years.”

Tom’s friends say that Tom is a fantastic engineer who prides himself on his ability to design and deploy stable and reliable infrastructure in all corners of the planet under all kinds of harsh environments. He spends most of his time online, which is part of the reason he makes sure that the infrastructure on the Internet is really stable. Tom has also previously given technical presentations in major industry forums such as NANOG and #IX.

Shoestring Budget Award

Winner: Luke Popejoy, SysAdmin for Integrity Computer Services
Nominated by: Mark Sanger

Mark says: “Luke Popejoy took our ‘little’ radio stations with about 21 computers and cleaned up our network and IT needs, literally overnight. Knowing we are a very small company, but have a giant need for computers to run our radio stations, Luke literally started working on our machines before he was even hired or even considered all our needs. He said, ‘you guys seem like good people so let me just take care of a few simple things for you right now while I’m here.’ UNHEARD OF!! Then when we got his quote we quickly negotiated and Luke is making the computers work for us. He is always monitoring and suggesting things to improve our network and our uses of our machines.

We have two industry specific pieces of software that run two different pieces of software, then it all integrates with windows servers, novell, Linux, a few machines with the first version of windows running on it and then it all talks using DOS, audio files, FTP, streaming, VNC, and whole bunch of other ‘protocols.’ So how much would it have cost, estimates were from $20,000-$25,000 for a new system and then networking costs and some hourly rates… way too much and not even affordable for us. Luke negotiated us into an extremely reasonable monthly fee for any support and help we need and at any time we need it, no hidden costs… If we need a new ‘drive’ or ‘memory’ we pay for it but there is no additional fee for things. It is truly an amazing thing!!! Luke says he doesn’t understand why I’m so amazed at his help… I guess he is humble, but all the parts he’s worked on help us create, produce, broadcast, switch satellites, maintains all our records, accounting, clients, and pretty much allows us to turn the lights on everyday. For pete’s sake if we had lost one of our machines a month ago, we’d still be recovering and running the entire radio station by hand and having people doing everything manually. Can you imagine running a radio station without computers?? We can’t and we pray we never have to learn how.

What does all of Luke’s ‘work’ power? It powers two radio stations in North Carolina, it powers the only local stations in our area, it powers our communities ability to talk about issues and ideas and even buy or sell something daily on the Home Ad show. It powers a whole bunch of community organizations that rely on our stations to inform the public and help others in our communities.

We purchased the radio stations from a company that had giant computer budgets so we more things on the network than we needed or even knew what they were or how to control them. So, Luke has maximized our network, local machines, backups, security, vpn and several server things that we don’t even know what they are… and much much more… It is almost unbelievable what he has done within a couple of months of working every now and then. He has done more in a couple months than we did in our first year of owning this place. Before Luke arrived we were on a domain controller and we were slowly loosing connections to machines and in a few cases we lost access to the actual machines. It was truly a nightmare!! We could not get access to, nor figure out the domain controller work, nor could we afford to hire someone, full, part, or anytime, let alone pay for any parts that most of the IT people we interviewed said that we had to have. NOT Luke, he has taken what we have and makes it work for us… yes, he’s recommended some upgrades as we get the money, but he took what we had, merged and converged it, and now we have a great network! I can actually sleep good at night knowing that we have access to all our machines if the power goes out.”

Flying Solo Award

Winner: Adam Merritt, SysAdmin for MaxWiFi
Nominated by: Richard Hughes

Richard says: “[Adam] joined us 2 years ago as our first employee and was thrown into the deep-end, configuring and managing networks including VoIP, WiFi & Fixed across major events sites such as the Open Golf, The Stella Artois Tennis Tournament, The World Rally GB and many many more.

Perhaps he should also be in the shoestring budget category as we are a struggling company so most of Cisco gear is rented in and arrives 2 or 3 days before we install a network.

Adam is in sole control of designing the network, configuring the equipment and managing the deployment of all services on a temporary basis.

This year we started on-site at the Stella Artois Tennis with 17 ADSL’s, 2km of ethernet, 5 routers, 19 POE switches, 68 VoIP handsets, 20 APs, (http://www.lta.org.uk/Watch/Individual-Tournaments/The-British-Tennis-Championships/) had two days break after that before deploying at the European Open Golf Tournament (http://www.europeantour.com/) 13 ADSL, 1 Router, 4 POE Switches, 52 VoIP 12 AP’s. That finishes as I am writing this and then Adam has to break it all down, drive from London to Scotland (8 hours) and reinstall all of it, plus a lot more, at the Scottish Open Golf tournament (25 ADSL, 8 Routers, 12 switches, 69 VoIP, 14 AP’s)

He is also remotely managing the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race Finish in Liverpool, The Tall Ships Race also in Liverpool, an event for the Ministry of Defence and a last minute event for Nokia in London! Somehow the networks hold together. At the European Open he had his radio taken off him half way through the event as nobody had called him on it as there were no issues!

Please remember that the users of the networks come from all over the world as they are journalists and camera crews, sportsmen and various others so we have no idea who is going to do what with our networks. In amongst all that our 24-year-old Sys Admin passed his CCNA and driving test in the same week.”

SysAdmin of the Year

Winner: Dan Kaminsky
Nominated by: The Internet community

There is little question in our minds that there is nobody who has done more to keep the Internet up and running this year than Dan Kaminsky, the man to thank for identifying a major vulnerability in the Domain Name System. While not technically a SysAdmin at the moment (though he’s worn that hat many times), we feel strongly that Dan deserves the SysAdmin of the Year honor because of the countless hours he’s spent working with SysAdmins all over the world, guiding them through the process of securing their DNS so their networks are not exploited. Dan has spent the last four months working non-stop to ensure that major backbones, ISPs, vendors and others were patched from a DNS vulnerability that would have had disastrous consequences if not mitigated as much as it already has been. For that, we have Dan to thank. And if you think you weren’t going to be impacted by his work, think of all the support requests and trouble tickets you aren’t receiving because he was able to get another network to patch the vulnerability.

———————-

Thanks so much to everyone who attended our SysAdmin Appreciation party in San Francisco on Wednesday night. It was a huge success, with upward of 200 guests mingling with counterparts and sipping DNStinis. We can’t wait to celebrate with you all again next year.

Our old settings page on the Dashboard succumbed to feature bloat and became hard to navigate. The left side navigation was lengthy and unintuitive — and not just to novice Internet users but even to our power users. Every feature we added just became a new navigational element on the left side of the page. And most of those features only had one option! The reason this happened is simple — we like to constantly iterate on feedback from all of you and that means we roll out new features all the time. While we love that part, it doesn’t work so well when you are trying to provide a consistent and intuitive interface for users.

Our goals for the new settings page were very clear:

1. Make the interface dramatically easier to use for novice Internet users.
2. Don’t remove any of the existing functionality.
3. Provide the level of detail our power users demand.

It was a tall order, but our all-star engineering team was able to do it. Without further ado, here’s a quick walk-through:

Left side navigation

The left side navigation has been cut from 11 different choices down to 3. Content Filtering, Customization and Advanced Settings. Content Filtering is where you can block categories of sites, block individual domains, or whitelist domains. It’s all in one place. Customization is where you can modify the look and feel of the OpenDNS Guide and blocked pages with your own logo and messaging. Advanced Settings, like it sounds, is one page with all of our various knobs and checkboxes where you can tailor our service to best meet your needs.

Content Filtering

The Content Filtering page was previous spread out over four different pages. Now it’s just one. You can use one of our preset bundles of filters or customize things to pick and choose from any of the 50+ categories we have available. Just below the categories you’ll see a much simpler way of individually allowing and blocking domains that you want to exclude from category blocking. An example for this might be if you block the Social Networking category but want to “always allow” the business social networking website LinkedIn.

Advanced Settings

This page has all the knobs. If you want to turn off stats processing, you do it here. If you want to make sure OpenDNS works with your VPN, you can do it here. All on one page. We’ve also updated all the text to make things more clear and easier to understand.

There are a lot of other small usability tweaks that have gone into making this settings page as easy to use as possible. Go take it for a spin and let us know what you think.

I’m very proud to announce that we are one of the only DNS vendor / service providers that was not vulnerable when this issue was first discovered by Dan. During Dan’s testing he confirmed (and we later confirmed) that our DNS implementation is not susceptible to the attack that was discovered. In other words, if you used OpenDNS then you were already protected long before this attack was even discovered.

In fact, for those of you who were listening in on the Microsoft press call this morning, you’ll note that OpenDNS was suggested as the easy and simple solution for anyone who can’t upgrade their DNS infrastructure today. Pointing your DNS servers to forward requests to OpenDNS and firewalling all other DNS traffic off at your server will help mitigate this risk.

We’re going to write more about this issue in the next 24 hours to address the vulnerability in detail and explain why we aren’t affected but I wanted to get the word out now so that you know you are safe using OpenDNS.

Thanks and happy resolving…

Update: Bert Hubert, author of PowerDNS, alerted me to the fact that PowerDNS was also not vulnerable when this issue was discovered. That’s not surprising considering Bert is one of the authors of the wonderful DNS forgery resilience Internet Draft that has recently been published. I updated the statement in bold appropriately.

It’s July 1, and at OpenDNS that means opening day for SysAdmin Appreciation Month. If you recall last year we made a big decision: SysAdmin Appreciation Day, which is July 25, is not enough. We need an entire month to show our SysAdmin love.

This year we’re doing the SysAdmin Awards a bit differently. There are four categories, in addition to the highest honor, SysAdmin of the Year 2008. The SysAdmin of the Year 2008 will be selected from the submissions to the four categories.

Nominate yourself, or nominate a peer. If you’re reading this, and you aren’t a SysAdmin, I can guarantee you benefit from a SysAdmin, so take a moment to recognize him or her. This is your chance to acknowledge the SysAdmin who keeps your Internets running.

Rules for nominations are simple. Send an e-mail to awards at opendns.com, indicate which category you’re nominating for in the subject line and tell us why your nominee deserves glory. Judging will be done by OpenDNS CEO David Ulevitch (a former SysAdmin himself) and the all-star operations team of George Patterson, Bill Fumerola and Jesse Davidson. The deadline for submissions is midnight on July 22, the night before the OpenDNS SysAdmin Appreciation Party in San Francisco. The real prize is the sheer honor that comes with being selected, but winners will also receive a $50 American Express gift card and be announced right here on this blog. The 2008 SysAdmin of the Year will get $200, a winner’s package of OpenDNS clothing and schwag and a spotlight on our Web site. This is the real deal.

So without further ado, your 2008 OpenDNS SysAdmin Awards categories are:

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, this SysAdmin managed to keep the network up and running.

Unbelievable Uptime Award

SysAdmins take pride in total uptime and this SysAdmin’s router has been up for years. Heck, it’s been up so long he/she might not even remember where it is. Wow the judges with a number of straight days of uptime.

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).

That’s it SysAdmins. Good luck.