Open DNS
When I got home from work today and checked my email I found one that captured my interest. It was from David Ulevitch announcing that OpenDNS had launched. Now this captured my interest because DNS is one of those things that everyone uses and takes for granted. Until it is not working anyways.
Side story: A while back the performance of everything I did on the internet from my home network went to h-e-double hockey sticks. I finally figured out that my DNS queries were taking an extremely long time. I double checked my DNS server entries and they matched what my ISP had given me so I kept looking. I finally called my ISP and found out that they had changed the DNS servers I was supposed to be using and neglected to tell me. After I changed to the new servers everything was just fine again. That little incident drove home just how important DNS queries are for everything I do.
What is OpenDNS? OpenDNS is an alternative DNS that you can use instead of the one your ISP or whomever gave you to use. They claim to be Safer, Faster and Smarter. Let’s look at each of those claims:
Safer: It looks like they are using blacklists to stop you from hitting known phishing sites. They don’t say where the list comes from or how ofter it is updated. Still, as long as there are no false posititives something is better than nothing. They have an example at InternetBadGuys. If you are using their DNS then you will see something like this: 
Faster: OpenDNS claims to have huge caches and servers located close to you. Right now they have servers on each coast of the US. Locations in Chicago, London and Hong Kong coming soom. Does this mean faster? Well, my test is still running so I’ll get back to this.
Smarter: OpenDNS takes what it thinks are spelling mistakes and corrects them. The example they give is www.craigslist.og becomes www.craigslist.org . This is fine as long as it doesn’t get too aggressive. I’m ok with simple things like .cmo changing to .com but not much else. Fortunately it looks like this is about all it does.
The Catch: How are they going to make money when they offer this service for free? Ads. Remember Verisign “service” called Site Finder? Basically what happens is when you enter an address that doesn’t exist you get directed to a search page that has suggestions and ads for you to look at. I entered the address www.geekinf.com and got the page to the right. 
The big difference between this and the Verisign Site Finder is that users are opting into this one. I’m still not sure I like it though. When I first tried it I received a blank page instead of any sort of search or error page. I’ll chalk it up to opening day blues but it highlights a point: If the search service is down or malfunctioning what happens? Right now I can customize what happens with my browser but when the search wasn’t there I was receiving a valid (but blank) html page. Personally, I’d rather get the domain not found error.
Back to Faster: Well, I ran some quick tests on the PC Mag top 101 web sites using my ISP given DNS and OpenDNS. The good news is that I didn’t see any significant difference between the two. OpenDNS had a slightly better average and more results < 50 ms but also had more > 400 ms. I also tried doing a full refresh in my RSS aggregator with both DNS services. This is not measurable but they were both quick enough that I would use them.
Is it worth changing? I like the idea of correcting my typos but don’t like the auto direct to search and ad page. Hopefully I won’t need either of those very often. That brings up the phishing site blocking. I like to think that I can spot these before I ever navigate to them but a little extra protection is always nice. I think I’ll leave my laptop using OpenDNS for a while and see if I notice anything wrong. If I do, it goes away and the server addresses live in a file on my machine for that emergency case when my ISP DNS is down or too slow. If I don’t notice anything then I’ll probably switch over the home network as well. Time will tell.
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