[Cialug] Blocking

[Rob Freiburger]

I use OpenDNS for my Fraternity at Drake. I have a WRT54G setup with Tomato
firmware to handle the traffic the network generates (believe me, it holds
up really well). Since P2P and file sharing are traffic-heavy and have
gotten us in trouble, I use OpenDNS to block these sites simply based on
category. Because categories are nominated and voted on by the OpenDNS
community (the other people that use OpenDNS), the blocklists are updated
very frequently.
Since blocking those sites, network traffic has greatly increased for
everyone. There also has been absolutely no issues with virus infections.

Other features I use with OpenDNS are global shortcuts and site statistics.
For example if a person on my network wants to access Drake's BlueView site
(http://www.drake.edu/blueview), all they type in the browser address bar is
"bv" and OpenDNS will redirect to the longer URI. It works regardless of
operating system and browser. With site statistics, I can easily monitor
sites our network has accessed and take action if it circumvents our
Internet policies.

It's completely free to use. The only advertisements ever seen are text ads
shown on blocked or inaccessible sites. There's privacy concerns, but in
regards to my network, Internet privacy was made clear to not be expected as
one person's actions reflect on the entire Fraternity.

On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 9:11 AM, Daniel A. Ramaley
<daniel.ramaley at drake.edu>wrote:

> On 2009-05-07 at 21:53:11, Nick Fox wrote:
> >Personally its not a bad idea to switch to OpenDNS anyhow. I did
> >sometime ago.
>
> I've heard of OpenDNS many times before. What real benefit is there
> to using OpenDNS over just running my own DNS server (as i do now)?
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Dan Ramaley                            Dial Center 118, Drake University
> Network Programmer/Analyst             2407 Carpenter Ave
> +1 515 271-4540                        Des Moines IA 50311 USA
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