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By Brian Livingston

A serious electrical fire cut power to a large Web hosting company in Seattle, knocking numerous sites off the Internet on July 3 and the early hours of July 4, including WindowsSecrets.com.

All of Windows Secrets' data was fully backed up, and all subscriptions will continue just as before the power outage, but it took longer to get our site back online than I'd like.

In February 2006, as I described in an article at the time, we upgraded Windows Secrets' server equipment and relocated it to a secure carrier hotel in Seattle named Fisher Plaza. Our Web host in this building, named Adhost (short for "advanced hosting"), maintains an elaborate system of uninterruptible power supplies and two diesel generators that can supply electricity indefinitely if city utility power is cut.

An electric arc blaze in Fisher Plaza's basement garage, however, destroyed the connection between the city's power and the building. The fire forced the evacuation of Adhost and every other company in the building, including KOMO-TV, Seattle's ABC network affiliate. The station's newscast that evening stated that the fire reached a temperature of 5,000F/2,760C and melted thick metal plates. (See Figure 1, photo courtesy of KOMO News.)


Figure 1. The Fisher Plaza fire, which knocked out hundreds of Web sites, was so hot that it melted metal plates in the basement.

Besides Windows Secrets' little collection of articles, the fire wiped some very big sites off the Internet:

• Authorize.net, one of the world's largest credit-card gateways, is headquartered in Massachusetts but chose to locate servers at Adhost on the strength of the hosting company's redundant systems. The credit-processing firm maintained a completely separate data center as a backup, but the servers there failed to come online when the crisis struck, according to a Data Center Knowledge article. Authorize's 238,000 clients were unable to process credit-card transactions for more than 12 hours.
  
  
• Bing Travel (a feature of Microsoft's new Bing.com search engine) was the last affected Web site to restore connectivity, according to the Dennis Schall blog. The travel site was down for 36 hours.
  
  
• Geocaching.com, a real-time geolocating service, was down for 29 hours. Jeremy Irish, president of parent company Groundspeak, spoke for many webmasters when he explained in a blog entry why his firm didn't pay to keep two data centers running at all times:
  
  "We're not a bank, so although 29 hours is a long time to be down, we do not plan to duplicate our infrastructure so we are completely redundant. It is just too expensive to make fiscal sense."
  

• Alertra is a service that periodically tests Web services and notifies the affected parties if a site is down. We pay about U.S. $7 per month for Alertra to monitor our Web site and our separate mail server's SMTP service. My developers and I were notified by e-mails to our cell phones just before midnight, about 20 minutes after the Fisher Plaza outage began. (Alertra's e-mail notifications are free; text messages and automated voice calls cost a few cents per incident.)
  
  
• EasyDNS offers a real-time DNS (domain name system), which allows a Web site to switch from one IP address to another within minutes. Without a service like this, a new server may not be findable by visitors for 24 to 48 hours while its IP address "propagates" gradually around the Internet. We pay EasyDNS about $20 per year. Once my developers determined that Fisher Plaza wouldn't come back up for hours, they were able to reroute visitors from our power-deprived Web equipment to a spare server that displayed our explanatory notice.
  
  

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By Becky Waring

Windows Secrets editors frequently recommend OpenDNS, a free service that blocks dangerous sites so you can browse the Web securely.

Unfortunately, OpenDNS has a few tricky gotchas for the unwary, but most of the problems can be solved if you set up an account and take advantage of a few tweaks.

In her June 11 Top Story, WS contributing editor Susan Bradley described how to use OpenDNS to help combat malicious Web sites. In essence, you quit letting your ISP's server convert domain names (like Google.com) into IP addresses (74.125.45.100) for your browser. When you type a domain name, the conversion to an IP address goes through OpenDNS instead.

This simple substitution of one set of DNS servers for another should eliminate the intermittent server outages that many broadband subscribers experience. OpenDNS uses a global network of servers that can be redirected in case of overload or failure. The service's main page shows the servers' locations in the U.S. and Europe. In addition, OpenDNS claims to resolve requests quicker than the DNS servers of most IPSs, which means pages should load faster.

However, the real power of OpenDNS — and the reason Susan and other experts recommend it as a defense against Web-based malware attacks — lies beyond mere name-to-number serving.

By filtering the URL requests that come to you through its servers, OpenDNS can block your browser from surfing to phishing sites and other kinds of undesirable content. The service also corrects typos you make, such as google.cmo, and lets you create URL shortcuts for quick access to the sites you visit most often.

OpenDNS is currently beta-testing a new SmartCache feature that loads the last known-good address for a Web site, even if its nameserver is offline. This kind of outage can happen due to distributed denial of service attacks, for example. This spring, Amazon.com and other big-name sites were unavailable for several hours due to this type of assault, as described in ZDNet's Between the Lines blog. With SmartCache, OpenDNS users can access these sites even though other Internet users cannot.

With such a simple premise, OpenDNS sounds great, right? Unfortunately, some people — including several WS readers who wrote in after Susan's story appeared — have had problems when attempting to use the service.

The correct way to set up OpenDNS

The issues our readers and other OpenDNS users report are due mainly to an incomplete or incorrect setup of the service. Many articles that recommend using OpenDNS say only that you should replace the DNS servers in your computer or router with two OpenDNS-controlled IP addresses: 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220. These articles, while meant to help users, fail to tell the rest of the story.

A simple IP address replacement is indeed all most OpenDNS users need to do. Full control of your OpenDNS experience, however, requires that you create an account on OpenDNS.com. Without an account, you're stuck using the default preferences, which may not work for your setup. For example, you may not be able to access a VPN (virtual private network) or Windows Home Server without changing your account preferences.

Similarly, you can't take advantage of OpenDNS's powerful filtering options without establishing an account. By default, OpenDNS uses a so-called PhishTank list to block phishing sites; the list is maintained by OpenDNS itself. But if you're a parent or employer who also wants to block sites in such categories as pornography, illegal downloads, social networking, or video sharing, you need to do so by configuring your account preferences.

To set up a free account, simply go to OpenDNS.com and sign up. You must also change the DNS servers in your router to the two IP addresses mentioned above. Instructions for doing this on most routers can be found on the Use OpenDNS page. Once your account is confirmed, sign in at the OpenDNS site and open the Dashboard to change your account preferences. (See Figure 1.)


Figure 1. Customize your OpenDNS settings via the service's Dashboard.

To customize OpenDNS for a typical home PC user, you would first add your home network using the Networks tab. By configuring OpenDNS in your router and adding your home network, you can protect all your computers and network devices — including smartphones that connect via Wi-Fi — with the same account settings. If you use multiple networks, you can add them all under the same account.

When you travel, you can change the DNS settings for your laptop's Wi-Fi and Ethernet adapters to connect to OpenDNS directly, rather than relying on your home network to make the connection. Instructions for Windows, Mac, and Linux computers are available on the OpenDNS Change DNS settings page. (It's fine to use both computer and router OpenDNS at the same time.)

Next, click the Settings tab to choose and customize your Web-filtering preferences. I have mine set at the second level, Low, which blocks phishing and pornography sites. Parents may want to choose a higher level of protection. You can also create custom lists of allowed and blocked sites, regardless of the level of protection you select.

Accessing the real OpenDNS mother lode, however, may be a bit more difficult for the typical user to figure out. Click Settings, Advanced Settings. (See Figure 2.) This is where you can add your VPN or Web server, activate the SmartCache feature, and enable dynamic IP updating — which is particularly useful for travelers.


Figure 2. The OpenDNS Advanced Settings page lets you customize your use of the proxy service.

To reach a VPN or corporate intranet domain, or to access such resources as network printers and network shares, you have two options. For home networks, simply add a "Domain typo exception" in the name of your VPN server or network domain; for example, vpn.mycompany.com. Together with dynamic IP updating, this solves a problem with remote access and Windows Home Server.

If you're already running a local DNS server such as Windows Server 2008 with Active Directory, your second option is to forward only external DNS requests to the OpenDNS servers and continue to resolve local domains locally. In this case, you update the external DNS settings to OpenDNS on your server, not in your router or client computers.

People who rely on a dynamic IP address from their ISP or who travel frequently can download and install the OpenDNS Updater, which is available on the OpenDNS Support page.

Putting OpenDNS to the speed-comparison test

Once you've got OpenDNS configured properly, it's time to try it out. First, you can attempt to verify OpenDNS's speed claims with the handy DNS Performance Test from Silverwolf's Auditorium. Run the test on your regular ISP's DNS servers and on OpenDNS's servers.

In Northern California, where I live, the results confirmed some complaints of slowness by the alternative service. AT&T's DNS servers, accessed via my standard DSL service, were twice as fast at resolving DNS requests as OpenDNS: 89ms versus 187ms.

While 187ms is a fairly good response average, the OpenDNS folks indicated that my results were atypical, especially since they have a server located near my house. When I asked several other Windows Secrets editors to run the same tests from their locations around the world, their results varied widely.

For example: In New Hampshire, Fred Langa got a test result of 132ms from the servers at his FairPoint ISP and 146ms from OpenDNS. In Colorado, Scott Spanbauer's Comcast connection registered 119ms compared to OpenDNS's 116ms. And in Phuket, Thailand, Woody Leonhard's TT&T MaxNet DNS served up 547ms against OpenDNS's score of 414ms. These results are virtual ties.

The bottom line is that your mileage may vary. I recommend that you run the same tests on your connection before committing to using OpenDNS. Even if you find a small performance deficit from OpenDNS, the minor slowdown should be evaluated against the security and reliability benefits OpenDNS can bring.

If you find a larger difference, this may argue against using OpenDNS from your area. In that case, you can also try DNS Advantage, a similar service from NeuStar. DNS Advantage is still under development but will soon be adding site-blocking and typo-correction services similar to those offered by OpenDNS.

NeuStar already has a large network of DNS servers for its paid, corporate UltraDNS service, so DNS Advantage is likely to become a big player.

Assessing readers' reports of OpenDNS glitches

As I mentioned above, some WS readers reported difficulties in using OpenDNS after Susan's story appeared. David Cagle complains that his ISP is blocking the service:

• "Here in Florida, with Comcast as my service provider, it's almost impossible to reach the OpenDNS Web site. After several days, I became suspicious and began doing some Web searches. Thread after thread of angry Comcast subscribers are all reporting that OpenDNS is either blocked outright or hobbled to the point of being useless."
  

• "Windows Secrets readers who employ Windows Home Server should be warned that OpenDNS will not translate the server's IP address correctly and will prevent clients from connecting to the server through both [Recovery] Console and Remote Desktop. Backups will continue to function automatically, and you can even access the server by entering the server's IP address directly into the browser, but the Console will no longer connect."
  

• "Because of following [your] advice on OpenDNS, I now have a browser hijack when I enter an invalid URL. It goes to their search page. I didn't ask for that and am having big difficulty getting rid of it."
  

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By Katy Abby When Google hit the Internet stage in September 1998, it changed the face of computing forever. Web searching was suddenly quick, easy, and fun. It didn't take long for this burgeoning starlet to grab hold of our minds and mice. Soon Google had left an indelible skid mark on the information superhighway. Several other search services have vied for Google's cyberspace crown, most recently Bing, Microsoft's revamped "decision engine." The company certainly has an entertaining and memorable ad campaign, but will Microsoft be able to overtake Google as the go-to search site for the geeky masses? Take a look at this tongue-in-cheek short, and decide for yourself! Play the video

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INTRODUCTION By Brian Livingston Fire at Web host affected Windows Secrets Low-cost tricks for short-term disaster recovery TOP STORY By Becky Waring Use OpenDNS to surf safely with these tricks The correct way to set up OpenDNS Putting OpenDNS to the speed-comparison test Assessing readers' reports of OpenDNS glitches WACKY WEB WEEK By Katy Abby Can Microsoft make a name for itself in search?

	LANGALIST PLUS By Fred Langa Does your system really need a pagefile? Reasons you may not want to quash the pagefile Unbidden, Windows awakens at midnight Perplexing partial Blu-ray drive failure Where did this setup.exe process come from?
	WOODY'S WINDOWS By Woody Leonhard Microsoft Security Essentials: a privacy risk MSE may enable Windows automatic updates No "middle way" for virus-signature updates Let Microsoft SpyNet track your PC's apps? The safe way to install Microsoft's new AV app
	PATCH WATCH By Susan Bradley New IE zero-day exploit targets XP, Server 2003 ActiveX control used in zero-day IE attacks Use OpenDNS to block sites affected by the hole

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