Richard Lennox
- @mirajavora nice!
- Evolving the role of a Sys Admin: http://t.co/Iyo0kK09
- Deep fried ear - Glasgow's new delicacy! http://t.co/VH61MD19
GoodBye Virgin Media DNS, Hello Open DNS
I have said goodbye to Virgin Media and its DNS service and welcomed Open DNS. DNS [Domain Name System] is used every time you browse the Internet. You enter the human readable (well understandable anyway!) address of a website into your browser and the DNS, translates the into the IP address (4 group numbers) that is the physical location of the websites server. Take this site for example: you have likely reached it by typing "www.richardlennox.net" into your browser address bar, DNS translates this into the server's IP address, 85.13.219.74, to which you are then directed. This makes the Internet much more usable for you and I, as we can simply type in the human readable name and the DNS does the work of locating its address.
Normally and properly your Internet Service Provider (in my case Virgin Media) does all this for you in the background and the service is generally great but Open DNS offers a much better service (and its still free!). Open DNS claims "to make your Internet blazing fast, block phishing sites and correct your typos on the fly". While DNS does add a slight overhead to your Internet connection, the claim of making it faster I cannot prove and am a bit skeptical about, but the other two are the reasons I switched.
Blocking known phishing sites (you know those sites that try and get you to enter things like account details by pretending to be your bank so the site owners can steal all of your money!) is an extremely great feature. It simply shows you a warning page saying the site you are trying to visit is a known fishing site, or that the site has been blacklisted for whatever reason and you should take care if you are wanting to continue to it. Great, especially for those who are not too savvy about these things.
Correcting typos on the fly is another great feature. Ever typed .cm instead of .com or .nt instead of .net? Open DNS will try and correct it for you. Or if you include a complete typo within the address it won;t show you a default browser error but show you what you typed and asks if it was what you were looking for. Pretty neat, hats off to Open DNS!
Richard, thanks for choosing OpenDNS, and thanks for sharing with the world.
John Roberts
OpenDNS
ps – Keep letting us know how we can improve, too.
I switched to OpenDNS due to this and a few other articles and forum posts out there as Virgin’s DNS servers had really messed up what was an adequate service from Blueyonder. I’m back to having that broadband feel to web-browsing after what was beginning to feel like the old modem days… Have to wonder what Virgin are playing at, anyway noticeable results from OpenDNS, nice one
Came across your blog entry via Google search in regard to problems I’ve been recently having, and have had several times in the past few years, with Virgin Media’s DNS servers.
So, I followed your lead and switched over to OpenDNS, and all the problems I was having ceased, and web pages are rendering slightly faster to boot.
WARNING!
BT DNS servers are sending out fake DNS results so that requests are sent to BTs servers on 213.120.161.0-255
When i ping USA sites i often get back a UK address hosted by my British Telecom ISP and i’m not sure if this is even legal.
FireFox on my machine is for some strange reason making calls to http://www.bbc.co.uk and for the life of me i can not find out why and will be playing with fiddler to see if i can learn more but it might just be that BT is redirecting Firefox’s safe browsing calls to the BBC for some strange reason.
i’m sick of Google and the like spying on me and yet i can find next to no information on the internet about turning calls to Googles so called ‘Safe Browsing’ off in IE/9.
Yep i will be using OpenDNS but still have a bone to pick with BT for opening up security isues on my network that uses Firewall IP ranges to block dangerious site.
Shame on BT.