Videotron has been acting very flakey here at the office. The past few days have been frustrating at best with up and down service that seems to have no rhyme or reason. The problems seem to be only on our end with Videotron’s DNS – some other people we know who use Videotron verified some issues. I’d heard about this service a while back, and decided to give it a run. It acts as a complete DNS service for your internet connection, and supposedly uses a large cache to speed up frequent requests, although I wonder about getting outdated data due to this?
I had a little discussion with Boris this A.M. about the business model that seems to be in place behind this. I’m sure he’ll have something interesting to say about this.
Matt (of wordpress fame) wrote a bit about it and got quite a few comments back,
“OpenDNS is a great idea, well-executed. They took something basic and ubiquitous, DNS, and improved it by adding spell-checking and phishing protection (usability enhancements). They provide the service for free in exchange for monetizing typo search pages. The typo search pages are simple, fast, and generally useful. What I was looking for is usually the first result. There is no software to install, just two settings to change, and they provide a registration-free way to set preferences on their site. John Roberts is a friend from my CNET days and gave me a preview a few days before they launched, I’ve been using it full-time ever since and it has been invisible in all the right ways.” (source)
We’ll see how it works over the next couple days. So far, so good.
2 responses to “OpenDNS”
Thanks for choosing OpenDNS.
Regarding the concern about outdated data due to our very large cache — OpenDNS absolutely respects TTL (time to live), the domain owner’s setting for how long a DNS record may be cached. We never hold it longer than the TTL.
Please don’t hesitate to write with more questions, and I hope your experience with OpenDNS continues to be a happy one.
John Roberts
OpenDNS
Thanks for the response John. That’s a very good thing to know – I couldn’t find anything about it in the FAQ’s.
We noticed an immediate improvement yesterday.
Cheers