OpenDNS

Description:

Setting up OpenDNS is a pretty straightforward tasks: You sign up for the service, then you point your DNS servers to their servers. From your admin portal, you can configure settings for your network. The point of OpenDNS is to filter traffic to your network, from the DNS level.

For a post with screenshots see here.

To Resolve:

1. Login to OpenDNS web GUI and take note of the following under “Configuration”:

   • Policy settings => Domain Lists => Global block/allow list: This is where you will add domains to be whitelisted.
   • Category settings: Set rules like blocking nudity/illegal/malware
   • Identies => Networks => Add devices: Here you would add anything WAN facing that is not being nat’d e.g. a node with a public IP address.
   • Protocol based attacks: This is for advanced features, we just left ours at default.
   • Block page appearance => Configure options that the end user will see when a page is blocked.
   • And many more. As most admins do, feel free to poke around and learn what you are paying for.

2. After setting the policies and settings up in the web GUI, you just point your DNS servers to the new upstream servers:

   • Login to DNS => Right click (ServerName) => Forwarders tab => Remove your current and add OpenDNS Ip’s
   • For me, it changed from:
     • ATT:
     • 12.xxx.16x.67
     • 12.xxx.17x.71
     • to
     • OpenDNS:
     • 208.67.222.222
     • 208.67.220.220

3. Right click your server and “clear cache”. It shouldn’t take but 5-10 minutes for it to start taking effect. Any issues you encounter you can put in a ticket with OpenDNS.