I first blogged about using OpenDNS when I used it to make my Telus highspeed DSL go 3x faster. Now 6 months later, they’re even better. A couple of days ago I was updating the DNS systems at Sutton and I was having a problem with OpenDNS’s resolvers not updating fast enough. Turns out the issue wasn’t on their end and I learned a few more things on why their service is superb.
First, instant messaging based support. Their Yahoo ID is opendns_team, and their AOL id is opendns. I added them to Adium and was talking to somebody in a minute. This is nice.
Second, their CacheCheck tool. You can see the status of your hosts in their cache. If the information is wrong or the cache hasn’t expired yet you can request a refresh. Very handy.
Third, when I was chatting with them they pointed me at this site, DNSstuff.com. This site has a rich set of tools to diagnose and debug many DNS issues. Here’s the DNS report for mostlygeek.com. Just as useful is the DNS Traveral report. The traversal report is located under the DNS Lookup tool’s results, hard to find but very useful for isolating problems.
Much props to the OpenDNS team for continually doing an excellent job.
[...] Allison Rhodes, the Community Manager over at OpenDNS contacted me about doing a customer profile on me for the OpenDNS website. I guess they do these kind of things if you blog about them and say nice things. They were particularly interested in commercial users of their service and I blogged about using their service at Sutton Group’s head office. [...]