What does OpenDNS do?

[Hunain]

Hey peeps, I was just searching around for material related to "ping" in multiplayer games etc, I came across a reference to this: OpenDNS | Providing A Safer And Faster Internet
The website is fine, but i dont know what it is about, what does it do? Could someone enlighten me? Thank you.

[Lourdes]

It's a DNS server, which just means it's used to lookup IP addresses from hostnames and hostnames from IP addresses. ISP servers are often rather poor, slower to update entries and so on. OpenDNS is much quicker and more up to date, when browsing - which invovles many DNS requests - you will notice the difference. It won't make a difference to gaming though.
Even faster than OpenDNS is running your own DNS server - TreeWalk DNS Home . You just install it and then forget it, no config needed, tiny little process that runs as a service.

[Phil_P]

^^ Thats the "faster" bit. OpenDNS also does content filtering, but for that you need to set up an account (still free) and enable what you want filtered in your profile, which is the "safer" bit.

For example, suppose you are redirected to a malicious site, say www.somebadsite.com. Normally your browser sends a dns request which gets resolved to an IP address and off you go to that site. I presume what OpenDNS does is deliberately block entries for known bad sites (that could be porn, malware, ad servers, whatever etc) by pointing them to an invalid IP address such as 127.0.0.1 (localhost). So if you try to visit or are directed to a malicious site, it's just silently blocked - you would just see a standard "page not available" error just as if the site didn't exist. By default, nothing is blocked - I think you select the categories you'd like to have blocked and it's stored in your profile. This is actually an incredibly efficient way of blocking sites and far more effective than using an add on application to do it.

[Lourdes]

The trouble with OpenDNS is that they take over the Google I'm Feeling Lucky bit from the firefox search bar, so if you enter microsoft you'll go to their own Google results apge rather than ms.com. Most annoying as it's a feature I use all the time.
I know they need to do this DNS hijacking to pay the bills but it's still a nuisance so I run my own DNS server, quicker anyway.

[Hunain]

Thanks people, very informative....anything else to add to it? So id do good to use it?

[Lucio]

We're actually using at work because it provided a cheap way for us to block out certain sites, such as social networking ones.

[Hunain]

Yes Lucio...I get the point, I think its good to use on a controlled PC, like my younger broz PC...I can set it up to open specific sites etc? Plus is it truly free?

[moogle]

yes it's free, theres custom site blocking too iirc.

[MarcLister]

Yes it is free. I use it on my PC at Uni and I can't really tell if it is better than the default DNS servers I was using, presumably my Uni network DNS servers.

However I think it is much better at telling you when a site is down.

^^ Thats the "faster" bit. OpenDNS also does content filtering, but for that you need to set up an account (still free) and enable what you want filtered in your profile, which is the "safer" bit.

For example, suppose you are redirected to a malicious site, say www.somebadsite.com. Normally your browser sends a dns request which gets resolved to an IP address and off you go to that site. I presume what OpenDNS does is deliberately block entries for known bad sites (that could be porn, malware, ad servers, whatever etc) by pointing them to an invalid IP address such as 127.0.0.1 (localhost). So if you try to visit or are directed to a malicious site, it's just silently blocked - you would just see a standard "page not available" error just as if the site didn't exist. By default, nothing is blocked - I think you select the categories you'd like to have blocked and it's stored in your profile. This is actually an incredibly efficient way of blocking sites and far more effective than using an add on application to do it.

OpenDNS > Support > Adult Site Checker

Seems they have an adult site checker, looks as if it is an extra feature?

[Hunain]

Orite, thank you Marc, thanks for everyones input

[MarcLister]

No probs Hunain.