PCA Forums

after reading FP's comments about OpenDNS over the past few months, i decided to check it out. no problems going on that required me to change, but i was curious.

turns out the service is much more than just a good DNS alternative. if you create a (free) account, you also get a sweet dashboard that gives you stats, whitelist/blacklist control, phishing filters, dynamic IP compatibility, and more. VERY impressive.

i use DynDNS and they have a nice walkthrough of how to update all of the services needed at once with this client:

http://www.opendns.com/support/article/187

they also have their own updater, but i'll stick with DynDNS since it's worked flawlessly forever and it's less work for me at this point.

thanks for being so persistent with pushing this one, FP.

edit: just found this feature too...shortcuts for your address bar. allows you to use friendly names and even launch apps, etc. pretty cool. http://www.opendns.com/features/shortcuts/

Ya, I use the full dashboard myself. I also use DynDNS and just made the necessary changes to their updater so it updates OPenDNS.

One thing I will warn you about though: you want to disable Domain Shortcuts in the dashboard. If you don't, you'll get 403 errors from Google when you do Google searches. Apparently OpenDNS automatically uses a shortcut to Google whenever you do a search query that somehow makes it look like EVERYONE who uses OpenDNS to do Google searches is coming from the same IP address.

I started getting these 403 error pages that explained that my search query "Looked like it was coming from a robot" and I was presented with a CAPTCHA I had to fill out. Very annoying. I did some research and found out it was the Domain Shortcuts feature. Ever since I turned it off, I haven't gotten any 403 errors.