For those of you that haven't clicked one of the attractive orange logos flying around the forums lately:
"OpenDNS offers DNS resolution for consumers and businesses as an alternative to using their Internet service provider's DNS servers. By placing company servers in strategic locations and employing a large cache of the domain names, DNS queries are processed much more quickly, thereby increasing page retrieval speed." Since last July, the number daily requests has shot up from ten million to just shy of a billion.
The folks at OpenDNS provide a 'free' (more on that in a second) alternative to the DNS servers provided by your ISP. The basic idea being consistently fast domain name resolution, with some phishing protection and 'domain name spell checking' thrown in. The service noticeably improved browsing speeds on my 6Mbps cable connection. (being provided by a small Canadian ISP with notoriously poor DNS servers) Several of my friends report massive improvements when using OpenDNS on college/university campuses.
OpenDNS makes its money by offering clearly labeled advertisements alongside organic search results when the domain entered is not valid and not a typo that the service can fix. If for example, you spelled Google.com 'G123ggle.com' in your address bar, you would be sent to an OpenDNS search page instead of the usual 404 page.
Have you used OpenDNS? What's your take?
View: OpenDNS
"OpenDNS offers DNS resolution for consumers and businesses as an alternative to using their Internet service provider's DNS servers. By placing company servers in strategic locations and employing a large cache of the domain names, DNS queries are processed much more quickly, thereby increasing page retrieval speed." Since last July, the number daily requests has shot up from ten million to just shy of a billion.
The folks at OpenDNS provide a 'free' (more on that in a second) alternative to the DNS servers provided by your ISP. The basic idea being consistently fast domain name resolution, with some phishing protection and 'domain name spell checking' thrown in. The service noticeably improved browsing speeds on my 6Mbps cable connection. (being provided by a small Canadian ISP with notoriously poor DNS servers) Several of my friends report massive improvements when using OpenDNS on college/university campuses.
OpenDNS makes its money by offering clearly labeled advertisements alongside organic search results when the domain entered is not valid and not a typo that the service can fix. If for example, you spelled Google.com 'G123ggle.com' in your address bar, you would be sent to an OpenDNS search page instead of the usual 404 page.
Have you used OpenDNS? What's your take?
View: OpenDNS
I would highly suggest OpenDNS - especially if you tend to be unable to access sites.
A quick example of www.neowin.net
; <<>> DiG 9.3.4 <<>> @208.67.222.222 www.neowin.net
; (1 server found)
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 1398
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 3, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.neowin.net. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.neowin.net. 900 IN CNAME neowin.net.
neowin.net. 60 IN A 66.28.242.203
neowin.net. 60 IN A 66.28.242.204
[b];; Query time: 81 msec[/b]
;; SERVER: 208.67.222.222#53(208.67.222.222)
;; WHEN: Mon Mar 12 23:01:49 2007
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 78
[root@storage ~]# dig www.neowin.net
; <<>> DiG 9.3.4 <<>> www.neowin.net
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 10745
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 3, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.neowin.net. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.neowin.net. 3300 IN CNAME neowin.net.
neowin.net. 60 IN A 66.28.242.203
neowin.net. 60 IN A 66.28.242.204
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
neowin.net. 2394 IN NS ns2.neowin.net.
neowin.net. 2394 IN NS ns1.neowin.net.
[b];; Query time: 73 msec[/b]
;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1)
;; WHEN: Mon Mar 12 23:01:54 2007
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 114
Yes, there is only a 8ms difference on this query. However, usually, in multiple tests with my ISPs DNS and OpenDNS, my ISP works better. I find this an annoying gimmick as for the "joy" of having my spelling corrected I get the chance of my privacy being reduced.
They were experiencing DoS attacks on the weekend, as I changed one of my domain names to another server and usually OpenDNS picks it up within a few minutes, took them over 14 hours to pickup the update to the domain.
I only wish it would block out certain spyware websites, but maybe I can do that in my account settings haven't quite looked at that yet.
opendns ping for me is roughly 45ish MS
my main isp's is like less than 20ms
@Kevin8020: the http:// http://www is not the fault of the dns service provider. It is down to the ignorance / laziness of the domain owner / host.
I don't see any advantage in using this ad-based service.
Secondly, isn't anyone of you at all worried about the datamining possibilities your use of OpenDNS gives them? Every _single_ website, host, whatever you go trough trough your internet connection gets queried trough the OpenDNS servers. They will have a perfect record of every place you have been going. Just something to think about.
Also, OpenDNS allows you to collect some general statistics about your own DNS queries. It allows you to see the domains contacted most often. It turns out that for me, with a dozen devices in my network, that the domains contacted most often are ones that support the Wii. I was surprised at that, as the Wii isn't generally used for accessing the internet, as opposed to our many other devices, like the XBox 360 which is played on-line all the time.
Their spelling and auto-search system feels more annoying than anything else, and interfers with Firefox' "I'm Feeling Lucky" search feature.
Their spelling and auto-search system feels more annoying than anything else, and interfers with Firefox' "I'm Feeling Lucky" search feature.
Uh, what? Firefox doesn't have an "I'm Feeling Lucky" search feature... not unless you're running some secret experimental build the rest of us don't know about.
Oh, did you mean GOOGLE'S "I'm Feeling Lucky" feature? Gee, I wonder if it does the same thing in IE and Opera?
Oh, did you mean GOOGLE'S "I'm Feeling Lucky" feature? Gee, I wonder if it does the same thing in IE and Opera?
Yes it does. Its based on Googles "I'm Feeling Lucky" i think. Just type "neowin" in the adressbar in firefox and it will direct you to neowin. Now try "neowin forum" in the adressbar.
Second, I've used OpenDNS. I think that the speeds were alright, but I didn't like the automatic search page. This is because it was over-riding Firefox's ability to do an automatic Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" search when a domain name can not be resolved. Only useful if your current DNS servers are not adequate (Too slow/Domain Filtering)
Well that's one way to make money. Heaven knows there's a lot of people out there who can't spell.
At least better than Rogers, notorious for crappy internet...
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,17502279
And even then, that as no impact on my web browsing speeds (as people somehow claim)
A DNS server in your router, cool. What kind of router do you have?
The OpenDNS ns servers are all hosted in US and one in UK, none in Asia.
The ISP's ns servers here are ok, thus OpenDNS ns servers serve no benefit to me.
Usually if I use cablevisions dns servers there is a big pause before the page loads, with open dns that pause basically goes away.
Big problem though. Open DNS makes some pages not come up. So you have to know wich pages work and wich ones don't
Even though my ISP is also bent on making money, it is a different customer-provider-relationship for me, since OpenDNS is "free" and "as is" while the ISP provides a paid service, that is bound to specific terms.
Personally I think it is way to risky to rely on an external party (which is not your ISP or a reputable DNS server provider) to do DNS-Resolution for you.
The local DNS cache would be the solution I would opt in for.
Versus EarthLink, this "targeted' advertising isn't foreign, as EarthLink actually does this as uses this method as well. RoadRunner, my previous ISP, however, DNS seemed to go a "I'm Feeling Lucky" search; which was really great. But it's a small sacrifice to make for a great, free service.
Seriously...who cares. If it makes things go faster, awesome, if not, woo. I've been using it for about a year now. It's great, it's free and my love of the fetish porn is quenched...daily.
RARRR...
The only reason I am not using it right now is because Windows Home Server has a weird bug where an intranet computer won't be able to see the WHS if you are using OpenDNS name servers. I'll be switching back to OpenDNS as soon as WHS fixes this bug.
Well, that's not really 'spelling' google, now is it? That's typing in random crap
Unless you actually test it in your environment then just stating that there is no OpenDNS servers in your area is not a good test.
It can actually be faster if your ISP has slow or poorly configured DNS servers or if they are unreliable.
In addition there is nothing stopping you chaining the OpenDNS servers in series with you ISP's ones in most operating systems or in your Router configuration.
In the UK the OpenDNS servers do seem to be faster than my ISP's so I use them in preference to those.
In Windows XP I change the DNS server settings for the TCP/IP setting to point to OpenDNS first and then to use my ADSL Router which is configured with my ISP's settings.
If OpenDNS were to ever fail (which is hasn't so far) then it would fall back to using my ISP's servers automatically.
Kind Regards
Simon
Which is a shame really because it's a really great idea.
To avoid any problems with that property (which is unique, as far as I can tell), OpenDNS introduced CacheCheck (http://cache.opendns.com), which does something simple (but unheard of): you can view what's in the cache for a domain, and refresh the cache on demand. For domain owners, that's a powerful tool when moving your domain, even if you forget to lower your TTL.
John Roberts
OpenDNS
David Ulevitch here -- from OpenDNS (and EveryDNS.net). I like the discussion here, you guys are all pretty cluefull. I wanted to let you know I can answer any questions about OpenDNS. I'm going to write another post today here about why hop count != DNS speed.
There are lots of instances where we might be 10ms further from you than your ISPs DNS server and we'll still be faster. I will link to some code that'll help you test too and find out for yourselves. The results will also help us know where we can improve connectivity and where we are doing good. :-)
Thanks,
davidu
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