I’ve been using OpenDNS at home and at work since the service was first offered. At home, I was just using OpenDNS for DNS lookups, that’s all. At work, I setup our M$ Domain Controllers to forward DNS requests to OpenDNS, again for DNS lookups only.
In May 2007, OpenDNS announced their filtering controls, I immediately went to their site, created an account, and setup my external IP networks (currently five of them at work, soon to be six). Granted at the time, it was implicit domain blocking only, but it was something. Prior to May ‘07, I was using a Linux server and BIND with a huge list of domains that I blocked by pointing to 127.0.0.1. It was a dirty solution, but it worked. Most of the domains I had in BIND were Adware sites I pulled from the hosts file changes that Spybot S&D added to the Windows hosts file. The OpenDNS domain blocking was a solution to my dirty fix. While I like having Linux on my network, the OpenDNS domain blocking sort of did away with my daily workarounds trying to block/unblock domains.
In June/August 2007, OpenDNS added category blocking with domain whitelisting. Oh, sweet day! I was able to block entire categories of internet content, for free! Again, for free!
Now back to the point of this post… Some people would like this kind of filtering for their children to keep them from viewing pornographic content or to avoid internet predators. I had never really thought about using OpenDNS as a parental filter before because I do not have children. NetNanny and other parental filtering software charges per computer. Now that homes have more than one computer, that could get expensive; paying for filtering year after year. If you have more than one computer in your home, you would need to setup the OpenDNS servers on your cable/DSL router (Apple AirPort, Linksys, D-Link, etc.), but you only need to setup the OpenDNS client software on one computer (preferably one the parents use).
Check out the Howtogeek article about how to set up parental filtering for free using OpenDNS.
Howtogeek via Lifehacker
Even if you don’t have children, you could still take advantage of OpenDNS’s Phishing and Adware blocking. It’s the setup I’m using at home.
I think I understood about two sentences of this blog post. And I’m pretty proud of those two.
I’m currently using Avast as my anti virus software at home and I also use it to block sites on the one computer that the family (read: 14 year old)has access to. Is there anything that OpenDNS will give me that Avast doesn’t?
Right now I can block domains e.g. http://unwantedsite.TLD/* you get the drift.
It’s pretty comprehensive in my opinion. You can block an entire domain or a sub- of respective domain. We use it at work, and I’ve set it up for a few folks up at their homes to block stuff from their children’s eyes. It’s network based so it’s less apt to be futzed with by the kiddos with a quick right-click and exit on an icon on the taskbar.