Jon's Network

In June, OpenDNS announced a partnership with St. Bernard Software to offer OpenDNS users the option to filter their network traffic for phishing sites and various adult categories using St. Bernard’s iGuard URL filtering. All you have to do is point to the OpenDNS servers and they do the rest.

This is a perfect service for those schools and libraries that feel pressured to conform to CIPA in order to qualify for e-Rate funding. CIPA, like all regulations, is ineffective and inefficient, but schools and libraries will conform because they want the Federal handouts. Most parents and school boards will go beyond the requirements of CIPA anyway when filtering their networks because of their own wishes for their children, not because of our benevolent Leviathan.

For you libraries and schools that just want to check the compliance box and call it good, there is OpenDNS. It lets you blacklist and whitelist your own domains and gives you some pretty nifty reports. If anyone whines, you can easily visit your account and unblock something as easy as you check your email.

OpenDNS is also perfect for you home users that want to keep your kids safe from online-nasties. Although, as soon as your kids find out about proxies and Google image thumbnails, you are out of luck. OpenDNS can’t solve those problems for you unless you added each proxy domain to your blacklist (impossible) and blocked google images (possible). This isn’t any different than any other solution available to a home network. For home networks, OpenDNS is a no- brainer. Get started here.

For networks that want per-user policies and reports, OpenDNS can’t deliver, but you might still want to use it. OpenDNS is fast and reliable (definitely faster than my ISP DNS) and has some other cool features like address bar shortcuts and typo corrections. I can type “jon” in the address bar and it resolves to jonsnetwork.com or type “rob” and go to robnewby.blogspot.com.

Learn more about OpenDNS. Look here if you’re a sysadmin.