OpenDNS – Free powerful DNS service

You may have noticed the Entrecard advertisement on the side of this blog, it’s a site that links bloggers together.  

Entrecard helps you get the word out about your blog, and hopefully find more people that you want to follow, as well as readers for your own blog.  

One of the habits Entrecard creates is looking through a lot of blogs in the beginning of the day.  You can see a list of blogs that are members of Entrecard and have looked at your site.  It’s nice to see a list of people who are interested in your subject matter.  Unfortunately, that list of blogs can reach into the hundreds on a daily basis.

I found myself queuing up about 40-50 tabs in Chrome (still using and loving it) and looking through everyones blogs.  

This brings me to OpenDNS.  

Before using OpenDNS servers, I would normally be able to only load up a page or two before pages started to fail.  I know I have a fast computer, and that the links were valid, the hosts were not going down, it was merely a problem with my internet connection.  Seeing as the problem was mostly binary — either pages loaded or had DNS issues, I figured the problem was DNS related.

OpenDNS has a great tutorial on how to setup OpenDNS on your network. 

It was quick, easy, and drastically improved some browsing experiences (normal browsing is a bit faster, but not as noticable as when I load dozens of pages at a time).

One bonus is that you have a dashboard that can be used to control your networks usage.  You can easily filter sites, monitor usage, and create shortcuts for any machine in your network (home points to www.google.com, mail could point to mail.google.com/a/domain.com, etc).

Below are some recent articles about OpenDNS:

• Lose your Time Warner internet connection (again)? You could try Open DNS
• 20,000 K-12 Schools Adopt Free Web Security Tool
• OpenDNS – a blogger writes about DNS security issues, and why OpenDNS helps 

Tags: Blog, browsing, Chrome, DNS, entrecard, internet connection, OpenDNS, security