OpenDNS as a Poor Man’s Web Filter
Web Filters are expensive, as anyone who’s ever purchased a Web Filtering solution knows. One way to filter dangerous sites might be to use a DNS service that helps with blocking some of the more egregious sites. This solution is provided by www.opendns.com They provide a free service where you use their DNS servers instead of your ISPs. They then send you to a safe Web page when you or your users attempt to connect to phishing, adult, anonymous proxies and other dangerous sites.
The good news about this solution is that it’s free. No, it’s definitely not an enterprise solution and there can be some problems with using it (such as when you’re a VPN client and need DNS services), but for small businesses and individuals, this could be an ideal solution to filtering out a lot of the dangerous sites out there on the Internet.
Implementing this is easy. Configure the DNS resolvers on your network to use the OpenDNS DNS server as their forwarders.
For more information about OpenDNS, check out:
Sorry for the short post tonight, time got ahead of me. I promise a more interesting and insightful posting tomorrow :)
Thanks!
Tom
Thomas W Shinder, M.D.
Site: http://www.isaserver.org/
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Email: tshinder@isaserver.org
MVP — Microsoft Firewalls (ISA)
Randy R. Scadden Says:
February 27th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
My question would be how could I setup my ISA box to use OpenDNS and use their service to do web filtering? They just launched a new service that takes and categorizes different types of websites and their contents and I was curious to know if there was a way that I could take and configure my ISA Boxes to automatically take advantage of that and do filtering based off of it? That way I can manage it directly from the ISA Machine and not have to go around to all 200+ client machines and set it all up. I look forward to your response.
Thank you,
Randy R. Scadden
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