OpenDNS is a free way to improve your speed and safty while surfing the internet. It does this my replacing your ISP provided DNS with the OpenDNS servers.

So why would you want to do this and is it worth it? There a a number of reason why it would be good to change to OpenDNS.

• Its faster: That’s what they say, i can’t think of a way to show how much of a benefit this wuld be. It would only speed up resolving urls though so i doubt if you’d notice and increase in performance unless you IPS’s dns is terrible.
• Its more reliable: Again unless you have a bad IPS you’re unlickly to notice, but since OpenDNS wants to be the DNS for everyone you can bet that have an invested interest in making the servers resilient.
• Its safer: OpenDNS keeps track of all phishing sites and block them as default. Oddly they give you the option to turn this off, but why would anybody want to do that?
• More control: It enables you to block adult sites , block domains and other bad things. This is good but I found that it bases this on your IP address so if your address is dynamic it could stop blocking sites when you reboot your machine.
• Its smarter: OpenDNS will correct common spelling mistakes in domain names.

So all in all is it worth it? Yes, I’ve been using it for a while now and the performance seems to be at least as good as my ISP so any added benefit does male it worth it.

Open DNS on BTYahoo

At first i found this a little trying to configure my bt home hub to use OpenDNS, and found that in the end it is pointless to try. Yes you can configure the router, but BTs own DNS servers cannot be removed and are the primary DNSs. Adding OpenDNS would be fairly pointless.

To use OpenDNS on BT you will have to configure the dns on each machine separately.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 2nd, 2007 at 10:24 am and is filed under Blurb. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.