OpenDNS

My ISP, Karoo, is notorious around these ‘ere parts for being generally crappy. The latest in a long list of complaints being the redirection of unsuccessful DNS lookups to ask.com. Their DNS is usually pretty slow to catch up with changes too, a fact illustrated every time I change the nameservers on a domain that I own. This is just one sucky thing about them, I would list everything but won’t for fear of everyone falling asleep after an hours reading.

However, thanks to OpenDNS I have one less sucky thing to deal with. Somebody told me about this service when the whole Karoo / ask.com debacle first came to light, but I’ve only just gotten around to signing up for it. No more ask.com for me!

It’s already proved how much better it is. I’ve just moved a domain name from one host to another - generally the switch takes at least several hours but as soon as I switched to OpenDNS the domain appeared at the new host. I know this because checking it on a machine that I haven’t yet switched to OpenDNS still shows the domain at the old host, even more than an hour after the change.

There are other useful things about OpenDNS too. You get a nifty control panel which allows you to blacklist sites either by a domain or by blocking whole categories, which is a nice feature for parents. You can also turn on logs which gathers stats about everything you do on the internet, add domains to a whitelist, create shortcuts and probably other things that I haven’t looked into yet. There’s a full list of features here.

On the whole, it seems really good. I’ll keep using it on a per machine basis for a while before switching via the router, just to be sure nothing bad happens like the internet exploding on me or something. :)