Maximizing Your Internet Connectivity Using OpenDNS

This week we saw a major outage with Comcast Internet in the Northeast.  Personally I use TDS Telecom for my DSL, but one thing I have used for the past few years at my house is OpenDNS and anyone using them were not affected by the outage.  Now why was the Comcast outage so interesting?  Well first you need to understand how the internet works.  For some this is second nature, but for those here is a quick overview.  Everything on the Internet uses an IP Address that looks something like 192.168.400.146.  Now there is hundreds of thousands of these addresses out there so it would be impossible for any of us to remember them.  They are like USPS zip codes in effect, each one is the location of a server, website, or other service.  This is where Domain Name Resolution, or DNS comes in.  DNS converts these IP addresses into names that we can easily use like www.yahoo.com.  So, what did the outage to the Comcast customers mean?  Well, all their customers had CONNECTIVITY to the internet, but the Comcast DNS servers they all used to resolve names to IP addresses are what went down.  That meant none of their users could basically get to anywhere…….unless they knew the IP address they wanted of course.

OpenDNS is a third party DNS service that provides VERY high uptime on their services.  The services provided by OpenDNS are more than just name resolution.  They also provide statistics on your DNS requests, as well as category based filtering of content.  For many households with children, this is a service you can all make use of.  Outside of filtering they also provide basic Phishing and other protection and in many cases faster name lookup.  The service is free to sign up for, and there is a basic Family Package for $9.95/month.  That gets you 1 year of statistics instead of the standard 2 weeks, which I find useful.  In addition as a paying customer you can add custom logo’s to your OpenDNS search page and you can disable the ads.

Setup is simple and all you need is a simple updater to keep your network IP addresses up to date.  I have reached out to them to do further integration with DynDNS.org using the company’s child service DNS-O-Matic to pull DynDNS hostnames and relate them to your networks, but so far I have not heard back.  Below are a few screen shots of the filtering categories as well as some stats charts.  Even if you were not one of the affected Comcast customers I would suggest you look into OpenDNS anyhow.  If you are an enterprise they also do enterprise based DNS services for your company which is very useful as your primary forwarding servers for external DNS lookups.

OpenDNS FIltering Categories (Click to Enlarge):

OpenDNS Stats Charts (Click to Enlarge):


OpenDNS Security Protection (Click to Enlarge):


About Chris Colotti

Chris is active on the VMUG and event speaking circuit and is available for many events if you want to reach out and ask. Previously to this he spent close to a decade working for VMware as a Principal Architect. Previous to his nine plus years at VMware, Chris was a System Administrator that evolved his career into a data center architect. Chris spends a lot of time mentoring co-workers and friends on the benefits of personal growth and professional development. Chris is also amongst the first VMware Certified Design Experts (VCDX#37), and author of multiple white papers. In his spare time he helps his wife Julie run her promotional products as the accountant, book keeper, and IT Support. Chris also believes in both a healthy body and healthy mind, and has become heavily involved with fitness as a Diamond Team Beachbody Coach using P90X and other Beachbody Programs. Although Technology is his day job, Chris is passionate about fitness after losing 60 pounds himself in the last few years.

2 comments

  1. Hi Chris,

    Thanks so much for the great post on OpenDNS! While we’ve added a good number of features to our service, at its core is still the reliable DNS service – perfect uptime record over the past four + years 🙂

    If you or your readers ever have any questions about OpenDNS, feel free to get in touch!

    -Laura Oppenheimer
    OpenDNS.com
    laura [at] opendns.com

    • You Bet Laura, in regards to the DynDNS stuff I sent David an Email to the address listed on his Home Page. Maybe you can ping him to check it out 🙂

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