opus:interactive | If These Servers Could Talk

Monday, June 09, 2008 at 4:10 pm by Brady Wilson

Protecting the minds and hearts of our children with OpenDNS

There is no argument that there is a lot of crap on the Internet.  And I am not referring to poorly designed web sites, time wasting games and an overabundance of news about absolutely everything.  The deep, dark alleys of the Internet (and sometimes not all that far removed) are filled with pornography, crime, drugs, hate and all manner of content I do not want my children to stumble upon and be subjected to.  Regardless of what some people may say about open mindedness and tolerance I won’t have it. Garbage in equals garbage out.

For that reason, several of us here at Opus who have young children have implemented a free service from OpenDNS.com on our home networks.  Put simply OpenDNS offers filtered DNS resolution services for a network or specific devices.

More specifically OpenDNS provides DNS resolution services for your home, school or business network that filters phishing and adult content websites based on a category system.  You can specify how stringent you are with the filtering by selected various category types.  In addition you can block specific websites that would not normally be blocked such as Youtube and Myspace or other such “gray area” sites.

My purpose for using the service is to protect what is viewed from my home network.  Utility of the service does not stop there however.  As a business it could be use to filter webmail sites, job search sites, and other content based on HR policies.  A school may use it to protect students not only from harmful content but maybe also from social networking sites and other sites not appropriate for the school day.

As a user of the service you have access to a dashboard where you can control how your filtering works and view reports of usage on your network.  The service is free and paid for by ads placed on search result pages.

Implementation is as easy as creating an account then configuring your computer to use the OpenDNS servers as your DNS resolution servers.  The service can be configured to work with a dynamic DNS service so that you don’t have to have a static IP address from your provider to still make use of the service.

The best way to implement the use of OpenDNS on your network is to add the OpenDNS servers to the DHCP scope options on your network so that all computers on your network automatically use the OpenDNS servers.

This of course isn’t fool-proof as all it would take in this scenario to skirt the use of OpenDNS is changing the DNS server settings on the computer.  Most young children will not know anything about how to make these kinds of changes.  Also, in the near future with the adoption of IPv6 into the home, self configuration of IP addressing will become much more difficult increasing the dependence on DHCP and DNS services making it easier to force the use of the desired DNS servers.  There are more concrete ways to protect against getting around the use of OpenDNS but we won’t discuss them here.

I feel one of the greatest benefits of the OpenDNS service is that it can be a set it and forget it service for home use.  Once my firewall at home had its DHCP service configured with the OpenDNS DNS servers and I configured my filter settings at the OpenDNS site I knew that the devices on my network were protected.  Being an IT nerd and hobbyist I would love to roll my own filter using Squid, filtering built in to a firewall, or any other slick method to protect my network.  But who has the time?  I wouldn’t want my kids to stumble onto something (What are those daddy?) because I didn’t have the time to keep the filtering service updated or operational.  While no filtering is 100% it is OpenDNS who keeps the content on the internet categorized and blocked.  I don’t have to do it. 

Check out the OpenDNS.com website to learn more about this really cool service.  A full list of features is on their site here (http://www.opendns.com/features/overview/)

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