Comments on: Protect Your Family Online With OpenDNS

By: Evan Kline

Evan Kline — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:16:23 +0000

I’m glad it is working for you Thogek. It does sound like the problem you had could have been an IP issue, so hopefully the dynamic IP software will take care of that for you.

By: Thogek

Thogek — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:00:55 +0000

Having a family at home with two high-school teens, and not much looking forward to the performance slowdowns and the time to review monitoring software solutions (but which I may end up doing anyway), I took a shot last week at setting up our home wireless router to use OpenDNS. So far, the results are looking good. Web use seems slightly faster then before, and the content-blocking functionality seems to work very well, with a seemingly very broad awareness of the domains that fit into each of its 54 or so blockable categories.

I did have a couple of periods so far where the blocking behavior seemed disengaged (and we could view anything unrestricted); not sure why. I’m keeping an eye on that, and hoping that it’s just an issue with coordinating our DSL’s dynamic IPs (which should then go away once I have the OpenDNS’s dynamic IP client software running on all computers in the house).

By: Evan Kline

Evan Kline — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 13:54:57 +0000

@Kosmo- wow, talk about someone who doesn’t understand the Internet. That reminds me of how quaint it was, back in the early days of the internet, when Yahoo’s mission was to index the entire internet by hand.

By: Kosmo @ The Casual Observer

Kosmo @ The Casual Observer — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 13:47:51 +0000

Along the same lines, here is a “strange but true” story.

The father of a friend of mine is a teacher. On day, the principal decided that porn fighting was a top priority, and that the off-the-shelf software was simply not good enough. He empowered my friend’s dad to search and block every single porn site on the internet. No stone was to be left unturned.

The overtime continued to accumulate until the principal moved on to a different job and was replaced by someone who recognized that one man using Google simply could not keep up with the pace of the internet pornographers …

By: Gravity

Gravity — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 20:23:30 +0000

I have been using OpenDNS for sometime now as my DNS was really slow on refreshing but i never know you could use it for parental control. Really cool!

By: Evan Kline

Evan Kline — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:27:39 +0000

I do believe that it can be set to blacklist/whitelist on a per site level. Our IT guy at the office has our firm on it, and he does that from time to time.

By: Bobby

Bobby — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:25:33 +0000

Nice. I had heard of OpenDNS, but never really investigated. I will definitely need something to create my own internet dicatorship here at home in the next few years. Kids start surfing at 3 and 4 now, man!!!

I wonder, does it have the ability to customize categories for your personally (as in to allow some of the sites that a certain category blocks) or to block individual sites?

Anyone know?

By: Evan Kline

Evan Kline — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:59:27 +0000

I’m glad you found it useful, Ruchi. I pretty much just use it for anti-phishing, but when I have surfing-age kids, I imagine I’ll use it more.

By: Ruchi

Ruchi — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:39:15 +0000

Too good . Childern these days study less and surf illegal things more. This is surely useful thing. I am going to share this link with all my friends . Thanks a lot.