Improve web surfing with OpenDNS

To save the electrical costs of running IPCop on an old Pentium III box, I switched to OpenDNS. Although IPCop required a physical computer running on my network, OpenDNS is Internet-based, so it requires no additional hardware.

Since it's a DNS service, not a proxy server, OpenDNS doesn't provide caching like IPCop did. However, there are so few duplicate page requests on my network that there were never more than a few megabytes in the cache anyway. OpenDNS offers phishing protection and URL typo correction by default, and if you sign up for a free account you can also take advantage of DNS stats tracking and content filtering.

OpenDNS is very easy to set up. All you really need is to tell your computer or router to use OpenDNS' DNS servers rather than your ISP's, and you'll start benefiting from the default features. Signing up for a free account isn't necessary unless you want to administer and monitor your network connection.

Note: if you aren't able to browse to shares on your LAN computers after switching your DNS servers to OpenDNS, you may need to add your workgroup or domain name as a typo exception. In the OpenDNS Dashboard, go to Settings, then Typo Exceptions.