OpenDNS Upgrades Network, Rising To The Google Challenge

http://www.manu-j.com/blog/opendns-upgrade-network-rising-to-the-google-challenge/408/

28 27 17 years ago

MikeCapone• 17 years ago

Yet one more example of why competition is good for the consumer.

Lately the browser war has made me very excited (love the Chrome for Mac beta, can't wait for extensions). Hope this DNS war will go on for a while so that further improvements and innovations can be squeezed out.

davidu4• 17 years ago

Just an aside, we're working on a strategy to widely deploy in India, Africa and Asia. South America continues to be a challenge but I think we have a solid plan for the regions I listed first.

aristus• 17 years ago

What are the challenges? High import taxes and high colocation costs? I don't know anything about your deployment but if you place servers in Sao Paulo, Montevideo, and Santiago (and Ciudád Mexico, for some values of "South America") you've got it pretty much sewn up, right?

prakash• 17 years ago

I would be interested in hearing more about your strategy.

India: Are you planning to deploy at NIXI or at many of the larger ISP's, in which case, it's not very efficient.

Africa: What countries other than South Africa, Egypt are you looking at?

Asia: Are you looking at deploying at the Equinix in HK, Singapore; how about Japan/Korea?

My email is in my profile, if you want to reply offline.

Apreche2• 17 years ago

This would be nice if their DNS wasn't WRONG. Give me an NXDomain when I misspell something, not the IP of your ad server.

timdorr4• 17 years ago

https://www.opendns.com/dashboard/settings/xxxxxx/advanced (where xxxxxx is whatever ID they give for your netblock). Uncheck "Enable typo correction (and NX Domain redirection)".

If you're setting up OpenDNS, you should really be setting up an account with them too.

ajross• 17 years ago

So, to be clear, in order to get the same (correct!) answers google is giving us for free, we should really be setting up an account and changing configurations from their defaults?

And this sounds like a good plan to you?

kvogt• 17 years ago

How else are they going to pay for their free, high performance DNS servers and network? Not a bad tradeoff, really.

Google can justify the expense of their DNS service w/ NXDomain's because it will speed up all of their web properties and generate more search revenue.

davidu4• 17 years ago

It'd be nice if you turned that off in your account if you don't like it. Most folks (who are not the news.yc crowd) are quite happy with our default experience.

And don't think I'm going to start tracking what you look at if you create an account, stats are off by default.

I really don't care about how much porn you look at online. :-)

est2• 17 years ago

How could they tell if I am carrying my notebook everywhere and logged on with a different IP address?

I mean, they have to hijack something to identify my cookies, right?

bugs2• 17 years ago

This is a really terrible way to convince someone to use your product and when you couple that with google hijacking you really don't have a service I want or will ever want to use (even if all is fixed)

cliff• 17 years ago

But you're helping break the internet.

When I write software, thanks to people like you now I can't depend on DNS to return accurate results. Another example of this is web browsers, which cache DNS beyond the TTL in order to provide a slightly faster experience. In the process, they break GSLB, which can no longer operate optimally since it can't rely on users re-querying DNS after the TTL of their answer expires.

Most folks are quite happy with your default experience, but that's because they're ignorant of the ramifications.

trezor• 17 years ago

Does anyone outside the US and China really care about non-ISP DNS servers?

I'm honestly not trolling. This is a legitimate question.

timdorr4• 17 years ago

I do when they're faster than my ISP ones (27ms vs ~60ms). Every millisecond counts.

Oddly enough, when I use Comcast's DNS servers the speed at which Modern Warfare 2 connects to online games is drastically slowed compared to OpenDNS. I'm not quite sure why, but it's the most noticeable effect I've had switching over to OpenDNS.

andyking• 17 years ago

My ISP's DNS server (in the UK) quite frequently goes down or slow - it's useful to have an alternative to switch to. Normally, I change to OpenDNS then change back when the ISP one is back up to avoid the ads.

However, since changing to Google DNS when my ISP DNS was down a couple of weeks ago, I've not actually bothered to change back.

(edit: having seen davidu's comment on this page, I may try OpenDNS again, sans ads.)

est2• 17 years ago

We do, only as secondary server.

slug• 17 years ago

I have a server/gateway outside the US and I prefer to use my own caching dns, since the ISP DNS sometimes is slow.

Here in the US I configured my home router to use the google 8.8.x.x servers since my cable operator was hijacking the DNS queries, that is, until I send them an email kindly asking to remove me from their redirecting service.

I assume that, sometime in the future, ISPs outside the US will start doing the same redirection, unless there's some law that prohibits them of doing so.

OpenDNS Upgrades Network, Rising To The Google Challenge

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