Help Protect Your Kids Online Free Using OpenDNS

As a new father I’ve been having a think about how to help protect our home network from malicious websites, adult websites, phishing websites and other nasties like sites that condone drugs and alcohol.

One easy way to do this is to use an internet service called OpenDNS. When enabled on your network OpenDNS will handle all your requests for a webpage. eg. when you type in www.internetbadguys.com into your browser your computer or router will first ask OpenDNS if that webpage is alright to visit or not. If its on the blocked list you will get a message similar to the below warning.

To get started go to http://www.opendns.com and sign up for their free account. (You can use their DNS Servers without signing up for an account but it doesn’t do any blocking).

Once your logged in you can add your network to the Network Tab  (it should automatically detect your IP Address). Next under the Settings tab you can select the level of protection you would like by selecting High, Moderate, Low or Custom. There are other settings you can chose but those two settings are the bare minimum you will need to configure on their website.

The next step is to setup your network to use OpenDNS by either adding the DNS settings to your router or to your computer. Fortunately they have a really good writeup of now to do this at https://www.opendns.com/start

Once thats done check to see if you’ve set things up properly by going to www.internetbadguys.com. If you have you will get to the following screen in your browser.