Faster, Safer, and more Reliable Internet Access with OpenDNS

Don Bradbury tries a new way to access a Domain Name Service

An integral part of the process of accessing the Internet is the use of a service that translates the URL that you can type into your Browser into an exact IP address of the desired web page so that it can make the required connections. This translator is the so-called Domain Name Service, and a default will be provided for you by your Internet Service Provider (ISP).

If that DNS Server has problems at any time you will not be able to access the Internet, and that's a more common problem than many are aware of, for the DNS Server supplied by your ISP may or may not be reliable. DNS servers are not all the same, indeed some are created "more equal" than others, as Orwell would have said. That's to say, although they all do nominally the same job, some may be more likely to be online when you need them, and that provided by your ISP for your initial installation may not be such a good one, or fast, or even safe.

The dreaded "DNS Error" message that can so frequently interrupt your attempts to access the internet means that this vital translation service is, for one reason or another, not available at the time, though there are other possibilities for the connection failure, such as your ISP server itself being down.

Connection failures are frustrating, and while we ourselves have obtained recommended changes to our DNS server from one particular ISP, this has proved to be no more reliable than the defaults we set up at installation time.

Enter, stage right, OpenDNS. This is a speciality DNS server organisation that aims to be not only faster and safer but, crucially, more reliable. We've been trying it out, and here's our report.

Based in San Francisco, but steadily expanding, the OpenDNS organisation maintain a large network of servers and aim at ultimate reliability, so you might consider giving it a try yourself if reliability is currently lacking.

All that's necessary to change your DNS server is to modify a couple of settings on your computer or router. You can do this manually in Windows, or follow the OpenDNS directions from their opendns.com website. Frankly, due to the unreliability of our previous DNS Server, we've made such changes so many times that we found it easiest to do it directly, via Control Panel, so just follow this Network Connections routine.

Locate your default Local Area Connection, double-click on Properties, and then find the TCP/IP Internet Protocol and double-click on it (this is for Widows XP; for Vista locate IPv4 in the list and then proceed).

Select the "Use the following DNS server addresses" option, then make a safe note of the figures in the two sets of four "Preferred DNS Server" and "Alternate DNS Server" boxes. Then over-type them with these digits:

208.67.220.220
and under "alternate"
208.67.222.222
and then click on the OK button.

When you've done that it should look like the graphic on the left.

Close the dialogue and then reopen it to check that's the changes have stuck. Then open the opendns.com website and you should see at the top of the Browser window the indication "You're using OpenDNS. Thanks". If not, recheck what you've typed.

Use it for a few days and see if your "DNS Error" messages start to disappear. You can easily check on DNS server downtime - if there is any - because this is written into the OpenDNS statistical reports, part of which is shown in the next graphic:

For ourselves, we are pleased to report that we have had no such messages flashed up since we made the move some months ago - apart from the odd occasion when the ISP server itself was down, in which case you just have to sit and twiddle until that darn thing gets back up.

Potential benefits

OpenDNS offers many advantages, among these being automatic correction of many types of typo when you enter web addresses. We tried, for example, dual errors by entering "particalpc.co.u1" instead of the correct address of this site "practicalpc.co.uk". OpenDNS had a little rummage around the WWW and found us, making the correction automatically and creating the link. It took a second or so, but it avoided the frustration of having to spot the errors and then correcting them.

Among the other features, you are also automatically protected from many phishing web sites. A database of such is maintained by the organisation and this is updated regularly. To see the full list of facilities, you can open a free account with OpenDNS. Thereafter you can sign-in whenever you like and see, for example, statistics concerning your Internet connections and so on. This is optional, and not exactly vital to your operations and in the meantime you have that wonderfully reliable connectivity you'd perhaps been lacking so frustratingly with your old DNS Server settings.

OpenDNS Forums are handy if you want information from other users, but we were impressed to find that an email to the technical help facility solicited a reply overnight. And that from a freebie organisation. Impressive!

In conclusion

Apart from a pause of a second or so when the OpenDNS Server first looks up the IP address for you, all aspects of the service we found very useful and reliable. We think the free OpenDNS service is certainly worth a try. For us it proved infinitely preferable to the regular DNS lookup failures we experienced previously. If you don't find it beneficial, you can easily switch back to your old settings.

 

 

 

Don Bradbury