All Things Vu

DNS is Domain Name System.  DNS translate web domains into Internet IP address.  All large ISP have their own DNS servers.  These servers provide all the IP address conversion quickly so that your computer gets to whichever web page you are looking for.  These servers are strategically located all over the US.  When you use the ISP provided DNS servers there are no way to manage it or receive any kind of reports.  ISP provided DNS is a one trick pony.  Does excatly what’s it is supposed to do and nothing else.  So what if you want to manage or at least view some kind of reporting on your Internet usage?  OpenDNS is your answer.

OpenDNS works the same way except it allows control and features that your ISP does not provide.  The first feature I like is the filter.  You can set OpenDNS to filter out websites you feel inappropriate for your web surfing.  Open DNS provides six filtering levels high,moderate, low, minimal, none, and custom.  I use custom filtering for granular control.  On the custom filter page you can also set individual domain to either always block or never block.

Another feature is the shortcuts.  I just started using this feature and find it very useful.  For instance, I personally use Yahoo mail as my primary email so I created a shortcut mail to point to mail.yahoo.com.  So when I type in my address bar mail I get automatically routed to Yahoo mail.  I also created one for gmail, my secondary email.

OpenDNS adds a layer of security that helps my home network from connecting to websites that are either phising or contains malware.  OpenDNS works either by individual PCs or by your complete home network.  I use the complete home network.  Here is how to setup OpenDNS on your system.