SteveMart.in

I am a big fan of opendns.com. You may not have even heard of it. Most people don’t even know what DNS is and would therefore have no idea why they would need something called opendns.com. Well, DNS is how your computer is able to figure out how to load each website you visit. When you type in http://stevemart.in as you frequestly do, DNS is what takes that address and figures out what the underlying IP address is for it. The IP for http://stevemart.in currently happens to be 65.254.250.110. If a switch hosts, that IP will change. DNS would be able to find the new address. If we had a DNS engine in our own brains, it would be like someone who has no idea where I live say “I want to go to Steve Martin’s house”. His little DNS engine would give him my exact street address so that he could go there. Wouldn’t that be nice? I could go through the process DNS uses to obtain the IP addresses of domain names, but for this article, it’s not that important. So, let’s continue.

Any ISP you use has DNS servers setup for their customers to use. Usually everyone just uses them without thinking about it because it is automatic and they don’t know they even have an option. Well, you do, and opendns.com claims that they do a much better job at DNS than the ISPs. If it were as simple as that, that may be enough reason to start using opendns.com but there is SOOOOO much more to it than that. Opendns.com is a way to actually control the DNS for a computer or network. Let’s say you don’t want the people in your home to be able to go to a particular website or even a particular catagory of websites. Can you imagine a scenario where that might be possible? If so, you would create an opendns.com account and program the opendns.com IP addresses into your router so that whenever someone connects to your network, all their website requests go through opendns.com instead of your ISPs DNS. Then you customize your opendns.com account to block certain catagories of websites or even individual websites as you see fit. Now anyone on your network that tries to visit a site that is in a blocked catagory will not be successful in visiting that site. They will get a page that lets them know the site is in a blocked catagory. Pretty nifty eh?

If you choose not to setup an opendns.com account, you can still simply program your router to use opendns.com or even individual computers and at the bare minimum, they will be a bit more protected against certain threats online. You see, opendns.com actively blocks many of the domains that certain viruses are known to “phone home” too when a computer gets infected.

I have opendns configured at several of my clients’ locations as well as my home and it does a great job of resolving DNS requests. And, we get a little bit of extra protection to boot. You’re probably wondering how much an amazing service like this costs as it is quite useful and would be so nice to use. Well, the greatest thing about it is that it is 100% FREE. That’s right, you get everything completely FREE. As of tomorrow, they will be launching a new enterprise version which I assume with carry some new bells and whistles but it will be a value added service which you won’t have to use. So go to http://www.opendns.com and check it out. You have absolutely nothing to lose and quite possibly a whole lot to gain.

I haven’t really gone through the nuts and bolts of actually setting up opendns on your network as I really just wanted to introduce it. You can get great instructions from their site but if you have specific questions, let me know.

Posted in Computer Networking | 1 Comment »

I’ve been married for 9 LONG years (just kidding honey) and have lived in 3 different homes with a short stay of about 6 months at my in-laws while one of our homes was being built. Since our first home, a condo, we decided to leave our outdoor lights on all night. The idea behind it was to not let our home be dark around it. Darkness gives criminals lots of great hiding spots. So, any place where we have an outside door, we have a light. In our 9 years of marriage we have never had our home or our vehicle broken into. There is one exception to this and it is when we lived at my in-laws for those 6 months waiting for our house to finish being built. My in-laws do not leave their outside lights on through the night so it is extremely dark around their house at night. We had parked our car in their driveway and when we woke up in the morning, we found that our stereo had been stolen and the trunk had been emptied. The funny thing about it is that my mother-in-law was in charge of the neighborhood watch program at the time. You can never know for sure, but I am guessing that our car wouldn’t have been touched if their house had been well lit on the outside.

So, my advice to you is to leave you outdoor lights on throughout the night. If you are concerned about a higher electrical bill, maybe put a motion sensor on your lights so they only turn on when someone walks nearby. But, if the lights are already on, the burgler probably won’t even check your house and will head to a house with dark hiding spots. Also, with the newer CFL light bulbs, you can put in a 100 watt equivalent light while only actually using 23 watts of power. Or use a 60 watt which draws only 13 watts. As long as you keep things lit up. Below are a couple of pictures I took this evening. One with no light on and the other with a light on. Which one appears more inviting to a burgler? You decide.

Posted in Family | 1 Comment »