Useless Nexus

Open DNS

I’ve been using OpenDNS on my router at home for just about three months now. OpenDNS is a free service that claims to be smarter, faster, and offer more protection from evil on the internet than your ISP’s typical DNS service. If you don’t know what DNS (short for Domain Name Service) then do some reading before you try OpenDNS. Be sure you know what you are doing.

Anyway, the OpenDNS features I was interested in playing with were the phishing protection and the content filtering. I have a four year old at home who is learning more and more about the many things on the internet. There are some things that I’m not ready to explain and I didn’t want her to discover an adult site or a dangerous site accidentally. OpenDNS has many categories to filter by. OpenDNS makes me feel better knowing that it is far less likely my daughter will stumble upon some of the evil and ugliness of the internet.

Filters go beyond the adult only sort of thing I am trying to protect my daughter from if you need to block other sites. Also allows for blacklists and whitelists if you need to block or allow a specific site. It all depends on how draconian and involved you wish to be.

I can’t say I noticed it being faster than other local DNS’s I’ve hit. But it was reliable. I only had one issue and I was able to explain that as not an OpenDNS issue. I had my laptop setup for a while to use the OpenDNS servers but I ran into some problems with an intranet at work. Since my laptop was only looking at OpenDNS and OpenDNS not aware of the local network then some in-house servers required additional changes for me to get to. There are ways to work around this. It was just easier to run OpenDNS only on my home router and not on my laptop

OpenDNS is not hard to setup but you do need to be comfortable editing your computers network settings or your router.

So it is a small piece of comfort for me. If you are considering filtering in your house then you should check out OpenDNS.

Tags: DNS, Domain Name Server, filtering, OpenDNS, phishing, protection, Security

Posted in Security | No Comments »

5 Links for Friday

I visit a lot of websites in the course of a week. A few end up in my Del.icio.us feed. I hope to give you a short list of a few I found interesting each week. Let me know what you think?

• TextOpus - Is a collection of web-based tools for manipulating text. Tools like convert all text to UPPER CASE or lower case. Or Capitalize First Character In A Word. Or maybe you need a Morse Code translator.
• intoDNS - I have spent some time fighting some Domain Name Service (DNS) issues lately. IntoDNS was helpful in understanding a few things. I’m still working on understanding my problem. Watch for a post next week on my issue.
• NearlyFreeSpeech.NET - I learned about this web hosting company from Alex Connor. Have not tried it yet but it is worth a look.
• Google Docs Download - Is a Firefox script that allows you to quickly and easily download all of your Google Docs and Spreadsheets to your local computer. So now I can backup all my Google stuff just in case Google turns evil.

So what have you discovered this week? Please share your favorite link of the week in the comments. Thanks!

Tags: DNS, Google, links, text, web hosting

Posted in Link List | 1 Comment »