Nirlog.com

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• I Think My Wife Is Cheating On Me: Why Men Are Never Published In Dear Abby.

There’s been a lot of buzz around the OpenDNS lately. OpenDNS is a DNS provider that offers free service, with safer and faster browsing experience. This is how it works.

1. You register an account in OpenDNS site.
2. Login to your account.
3. Change your DNS Setting pointing to OpenDNS Servers.

That’s it, you’re good to go. The only difference from your normal environment is that now you’re using the OpenDNS DNS Servers.

The Advantages of using OpenDNS Server

You’ll be protected from Phishing attacks because OpenDNS keeps the database of phishing sites, so it can identify and stop sites trying to phish (cheat or trick) you. It claims to be faster than your ISPs DNS with large cache but I didn’t notice any change in my browsing speed after the change, but this could definitely be an advantage if your ISPs DNS is slow. It can correct the typos for you. For example, if you type nirlog.cmo instead of nirlog.com, it’ll correct your mistake and point you to the right site. The latest feature called Shortcuts allows you to type something easy-to-remember into your address bar for those web sites you visit often. For example, I can just type short “gmail” to visit Gmail, instead of typing the full url “http://www.gmail.com/“. This, I think is a very handy feature. Network admins can configure the full office networks too.

You can map short names for your favorite web sites

The Down side of using OpenDNS Server

You need to be always logged in to the Open DNS web site to use the service. They make money from the advertisement. It works like this, when there’s a typo OpenDNS cannot fix, it’ll redirect you to a yahoo search result with advertisement. I think that’s ok, but in some cases they’ll redirect you to a site that’s nothing to do with the web site you intended to visit. For example if you type http://nirlog.cm then it’ll redirect you to http://agoga.com/. It’s clearly not the site I intended to visit, the best thing OpenDNS could have done is to redirect to nirlog.com since there’s no nirlog.cm or at least it could have redirected to an organic search in Yahoo, the search engine they’re using. So, I think OpenDNS’s decision on what’s a typo, what’s wrong and right could be questionable. Actually the redirection has nothing to do with OpenDNS, it’s due to registrar for Cameroon, who has created parked pages with Agoga for every unregistered .cm domain.

When I typed http://nirlog.cm it redirected me to http://agoga.com

I think OpenDNS has a clear advantage over your ISPs DNS, with it’s phishing protection and speed in some cases. The shortcut is a very handy feature too. So for my personal machine I’ll keep the OpenDNS setting.

Update: John Roberts from OpenDNS has cleared the point about .cm domain in his comment, apparently registrar for Cameroon has created parked pages with Agoga for every unregistered .cm domain. So, it has nothing to do with OpenDNS. And also if you’ve setup OpenDNS on your networks, then you don’t need to login to the web site.

I was greeted with several New Year SMS Greetings early this morning. Nepali New Year provides a nice opportunity to connect with friends and relatives while away from home. I would like to take this opportunity to wish all of my readers a Happy and Prosperous New Year 2064. I truly hope and wish that this year will bring peace, prosperity and development to Nepal and it’s people. For non-nepali readers here’s a good description of Nepali Calendar.

Recently I haven’t been able to commit as much time as I would have wanted to on this blog. Currently I’m very busy with other projects and hopefully I’ll be free soon to start regular posting here.

Allan Leinwand at GigaOM has an interesting post about Web 2.0 & Death of the Network Engineer.

I was recently meeting with a Web 2.0 company discussing their network infrastructure plans. As I started asking questions about their racks of servers, their storage area network (SAN), their plans for routing, load-balancing and network security, the CTO of the company stopped me and made a bold statement.

He said, “The Internet is like electricity. We plug into it and all of the things that you mention are already there for us. We don’t spend any time at all on network or server infrastructure plans.”

To this CTO, knowing the details of his network and server infrastructure was like knowing the details of the local utility electricity grid – not required. Is this a bad thing, or proof that networking technologies have succeeded?

I think for Web 2.0 startups the network infrastructure and the internet is really like electricity in the beginning, but once you start to grow and need to scale, you can’t afford the black box approach. Then you’ll need to have a very detailed understanding of everything.

Today it’s impossible to think business and personal communications without email. Sending and receiving emails costs you and me nothing. It’s free! The zero cost (for users), the efficiency of delivery, and ease of use has made it so popular. But now email has become a victim of it’s own success. Just my quick test with one email server for 4 days showed that 96% of the emails received were abusive.

The email protocol (SMTP) was designed at a time when very few people were using emails and everyone basically knew each other. So, security was not a concern, but today the world has changed and that trust isn’t there anymore, but the SMTP protocol we’re using remains the same.

So, how is today’s technology dealing with this problem?

Read the rest of this entry »