OpenDNS
I recently set up OpenDNS as my forwarding DNS server. Why? I was looking for a solution to control what sites the people on my home network go to. There are several solutions out there, but I had a hard time finding a solution that supported all the devices on my home network. OpenDNS is primarily a DNS server and OpenDNS does its filtering based upon the DNS request and every time a device goes to the Internet, the device will make a DNS request and with OpenDNS, the request will get process by OpenDNS and possibly filtered based on the classification of the site in the DNS request.
OpenDNS has three plans available; Basic, Deluxe, and Enterprise. I am currently using the Basic account, which is free, and seems to give most of the features that the Deluxe package has. Having said that, the Deluxe package only costs $9.95/year for a household and if my trial goes well, then I will pay for their service.
In the settings, you have the option to choose 6 different filtering levels. The levels are:
- High - Blocking adult-related sites, illegal activity, social networking sites, video sharing sites, and general time-wasters.
- Moderate - Blocking adult-related sites and illegal activity.
- Low - Blocking pornography and phishing.
- Minimal - Blocking phishing attacks(this is the default setting).
- None - Nothing blocked.
- Customer - You choose the categories to be blocked.
OpenDNS offers 55 different categories which you can select. You can start with one of the levels OpenDNS defines or you can customize it to meet your needs. For example, I have set my filtering to "Low", which filters pornography, sexuality, phishing, proxy/anonymizer, and tasteless. This sounds about right for my home right now.
The settings are applied per network that you register with OpenDNS. If, like most people, you have a dynamic IP address from your ISP, then you will have to run a client that will periodically update the IP address for OpenDNS. This will make sure that DNS requests from your current IP address are filtered by the policy that you have defined.
For homes with several devices, I think this is a perfect service to control where all the devices are going.
Comments
DNS
Are you saying that this DNS is extra security for your computer? Does it block attacks? Is it a good option if you do banking on your computer / network?
DNS and Security
OpenDNS does provide extra security by blocking the requests from your network that are going to "phishing" sites and more. I am mainly using OpenDNS to keep the young computer users in my house from going to sites that are not appropriate for them.
For example, there are many sites on the Internet that take advantage of people mistyping a site name, like Google. Most people would not have a problem going to Google at www.google.com, but if you mistype Google was www.googlle.com, you have just gone to a pornographic site. Not something that the young people on my network need to be viewing.
I hope that helps.
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