Mike's Tech Blog

About a year ago I discovered OpenDNS, and I am pleased with the results. OpenDNS speeds up your internet surfing, as well as provides a measure of safety from phishing threats, and some forms of virus attacks, such as the recent Conflicker virus. OpenDNS also provides some content filtering as well. And the best part, its free! I am going to show you how to set up your computer to use OpenDNS because everyone wants to surf the internet safely.

 But first, let me explain how it works. In order to do that, you need a bit of understanding on how the internet works. When you want to go to a web site, say, www.mikestechblog.com, what happens is that computers don't understand that. They really only understand numbers. so what happens is that this info gets sent to a sort of "human to computer" translator. which takes what we have typed in to our browser and translates it to numbers  so the computers of teh internet can understand (if you will) what we want to see. I know I am way over simplifying here, but that is the gist of it. The computers that do this translation are called DNS servers.

The problem is that often times these DNS servers are slow, and sometimes even mis-configured. It is a rather common occurance for your browser to require several DNS lookups when loading just one page! Since often times one DNS lookup can take as long as 200 milliseconds, this certainly can be a large percentage of the time it takes to load a web page into your browser. OpenDNS strives to provide fast, accurate, and safe DNS lookups and like I said, its a free service.They are able to keep it free through advertising. Now don't let that scare you away, you will only get advertising if you type a domain name that doesn't exist into your browser. Even then its not bothersome at all!

 So, now the question is, how to set up our computer to use OpenDNS. This article will only cover setting up a windows XP compute. If you know your way around the various operating systems out there, then you can figure it out. I will however cover other operating systems, as well as setting up a whole network to use OpenDNS in a later article.

 The first thing you need to do is go to www.OpenDNS.com and set up an account. After that, just click on your Start button, then on Network Connections then on Local Area Connection. A window will open up. In the lower left click the Properties button, and the following window will appear:

 Single click Internet Protocol(TCP/IP) that is circled above, then click on Properties. Then you will see the following window:

Single click on the radio button Use the following DNS server addresses as circled above, and enter the following IP addresses as circled above:

     208.67.222.222
     208.67.220.220

Close down all of the windows you opened, and enjoy faster, ans safer internet surfing.

Speaking of safer internet surfing, here are some of the safety features of OpenDNS.Login to your OpenDNS account, At the top of hte page click on Dashboard. then click on Settings. From here, you can customize your OpenDNS account. The most popluar option is content filtering as pictured below:

 Additionally you can enable Stats and logs if you want to monitor where people have been web surfing. You can also further personalize your settings, to block out specific web sites, or specific groups of sites like P2P sites for example.

So there you go. Give OpenDNS a try. It has helped speed up my internet surfing.

   -- Mike