I’ve had my eyes on OpenDNS for a while now and I’ve seen them grow from an initial concept to what they are now.
For those that don’t know, OpenDNS provide a top quality service for the domain name system. DNS is used in most things you do online such as looking up websites, sending email, uploading your web pages, using MSN and so on. This is automatically provided to you by your ISP, but in most cases it isn’t that well looked after and can often break (I’ve experienced that a few times on NTL!)

By changing two IP addresses in your router or computer, you can take advantage of the OpenDNS system. You don’t even have to signup to use it!

What you get for changing those two IP addresses is a reliable and fast DNS service which has had no downtime since it came to life in July 2006 along with options to block phishing websites and adult websites. You also have the option to log statistics and create shortcuts.

There’s plenty of things to take advantage over, but the main thing is more speed. Definitely worth it for that alone!

WHM isn’t exactly easy to get to what you need sometimes and today’s been no different. My self-signed SSL certificate that appears for my hosting customers when they login to cPanel or secure webmail was up for expiry today so I had to redo the generation again.

Here’s how to do it for my future reference and anyone that gets stuck doing it themselves.

• Login to WHM
• Scroll down and under “Web SSL/TLS” click on “Generate a SSL Certificate and Signing Request”
• Enter your necessary details and click on create
• Next, under “SSL/TLS” click on “Change Server Certificates”
• Choose cPanel/WHM server
• In the box next to “Domain this CRT is for” type in the host name you entered for the generation process
• Click the two fetch buttons below to automatically get the .key and .crt files
• Click submit in the top left

You should now be left with a functional SSL certificate for your cPanel/WHM server.
The way my hosting companies support representative went about it was to click on “Reset server certificates”. Whilst this initially appears fine, it sets the SSL certificate to localhost as your hostname and not your actual DNS hostname. This causes errors in email clients and web browsers.

I’ve been adding a few honey pots to various different websites I run. I’ve also added several MX entries in order for random addresses to be created. This is my contribution to combating spam.

EasyDNS, the people who provide me with DNS services have been suffering from a DoS attack for the past two days.

The attack initially started out on only one of their nameservers, but has since grown to include all six of their nameservers. I think they’ve done pretty well so far as I’ve not noticed any major problems and no one I host has mentioned any problems either.

I think NTL has been the source of my connection troubles recently, so hats off to the EasyDNS folk for managing to keep a complex system working, even under stress.