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Open DNS is s***ware

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f0dder:
For people using the "speed" argument in favor of OpenDNS... install your own caching DNS server, and go directly at the root servers. Will be somewhat slower than your ISP in the beginning, but once you get your mostly-used DNS stuff cached, it'll be lightning fast - and OpenDNS won't be able to track you (for those paranoid people). For Windows, treewalk DNS works charms, for linux you have a zillion choices.

As for blocking ads, that's not really something you should be using OpenDNS for... either privoxy, or the lovely FireFox+AdBlockPlus combo. Along with NoScript for flash/javascript whitelisting.

Fred Nerd:
Interesting: here's a status update.....
After going back to ISP DNS firefox started getting Page Not found Errors, which it had been getting before, but only on FF3, 2 was alright, and Windows Live Messenger also started playing up, no surprises there.

So I am back on it, but know to change it when things play up.

I believe these problems have to do with the fact that me net connection is through 2-way satellite, which has a few problems. Gaming is impossible due to connection lag, even on fast plans.
But it also could have to do with some form of rot, I have used this computer very intensively for a few years, and she needs a clean up. and reinstall, some services no longer work (WMI)

So maybe Open DNS isn't too bad, but it seems to play up with Myspace, so I'll just have to make a macro to change it over, might be hard, any help?

Might try treewalk someday

neenee:
I use OpenDNS as well, but to block unwanted content, not ads or because I have ISP DNS server problems.

I have no complaints about it whatsoever.

Gothi[c]:
I'm not sure why people use OpenDNS when there's many good free DNS servers out there (eg: 4.2.2.2-6) Those in combination with rolling your own cacheing server, and you'll have a more stable and fast system then what openDNS provides, and a tad bit more privacy as well, without the ads.

city_zen:
Thanks for the info, Gothi[c]. I didn't know of those public servers (I mean 4.2.2.1-6) until now. I think the only public DNS servers I knew about were the well publicized OpenDNS.
I've heard good things and not so good things about OpenDNS but in the end I decided they weren't providing such a noticeable advantage compared with my ISP DNS servers to justify the change.
Anyway, I've now set up 4.2.2.1 as my secondary DNS server in case my ISP DNS server isn't reachable (which doesn't happen very often, but still)

On a related note, while googling this subject I came across a little (as in 36,864 bytes-little  :)) and very useful app called DNS Tester. Yup, no prizes for guessing it's a DNS tester. Surprisingly, it was the only tool I could find that allows you to test the response time of different DNS servers. It's free and open source, though it doesn't seem to be updated anymore.
By using DNS Tester, you can tell for sure whether OpenDNS, your ISP's DNS servers or 4.2.2.1 is faster. In my case, it was my ISP's, so I'm sticking with those. By the way, both OpenDNS and 4.2.2.2 seem to be about the same in speed.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a bug in that program (or at least on my system it does) that prevents it from testing more than 1 url at a time (it's prepared to test many).

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