OpenDNS Rocks...
So I've been looking for a web content filtering solution for a couple months now. I am someone who likes to see everything going on in the network. Due to the setup of the network I have I cannot take advantage of the keyword blocking that my Linksys offers.
I actually tried it before and it didn't seem to work properly. So finally this weekend I get into doing some research and finding out what could work and what wouldn't. Fortunately I have a very
network intelligent friend who knows all these things. He had a great suggestion, and that was to try out
OpenDNS.org.
So after taking a quick peek at the website, I thought it was going to be a great idea. Unfortunately again because of my network setup it did take a little bit of extra configuring. I have an Xserve that acts as my gateway and I have an Airport Express that dishes out WiFi to clients.
So at first I put in the OpenDNS name servers in the DHCP scope so that all the clients would get them also. Unfortunately that didn't seem to work. I couldn't access anything that required DNS from any client machines, but I could from the Xserve. I did notice that when I turned the Xserve firewall off that I could access things with the client, but I wasn't about to drop all security so I could block some porn.
So instead of giving the clients the actual name servers, I just put the OpenDNS servers into both of the Xserves interfaces and the Airport Express. I also got pointed to
this help article which added a few things to a configuration file within OS X. Restarted DNS on the Xserve and renewed my DHCP stuff on the client.
It pretty much worked right away. I did notice that it took up to 10 minutes for everything to fully work. it was pretty easy to setup once you understand how DNS/DHCP works...
My next OpenDNS setup was in my apartment. Apparently OpenDNS can even speed things up, so I figured why not use it...that and I would love to see how many DNS requests come out of my networks.
Becuase I have a dynamic IP address in this network I had to download this little AppleScript utility. Very easy to setup though, just plugin my username and password. I then added this network into my OpenDNS control panel and made sure I checked off Dynamic IP Address. Then I hit the 'update' button in the AppleScript application and it was done! So very simple...
So if you're looking for a solution that can block porn, or correct misspellings (www.google.cmo), or a service that can speed up DNS resolution or even something that can just track your DNS stats.
Yep, it's great.
