Asia Tech Blog

I’ve been helping many people everyday this past month who have for one reason or other been having severe connectivity problems due mostly to Thai ISPs messing with their DNS servers, trying to play filtering tricks and making a poor job of it.

Yesterday, in an effort cut the workload I posted a slightly different version of the post here about OpenDNS, because it was the solution that solved most of the problems people were having, and I was really getting sick of explaining it over and over again in one forum after another. I wrote it in my own words, as I always do, but I used some screenshots from OpenDNS to explain things a bit better. Well, I wondered why the IP address of my host’s abuse department was crawling through every site I host on this server. Shortly after this they forwarded me an email from someone at OpenDNS who I won’t identify here. Turns out he took exception to this and would prefer that I just link everyone straight to their site. Can you imagine if every magazine that reviewed and explained new products just published links to the manufacturers site? Excuse me if I was misled by the following declaration on their site:

Creative Commons. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License. We would appreciate a link to our home page http://www.opendns.com/ if you do use the work, though the link is not required. (quoted from opendns.org)

Seems my host’s didn’t need to get involved. I mean, the email address to this site’s admin is published and the comments are left open for two weeks after a post. I really took exception to how he inferred I just took the content. I’m sorry, but I’ve been writing and publishing for almost 15 years now and not once have I ever just taken someone else’s writing.

So to the OpenDNS people, I don’t need these hassles. I don’t need a suspicious abuse department at Godaddy rooting through my server. The (supposedly creative commons) images are gone. They will be replaced later by my own identical screenshots, but for now here is the text version. If anyone needs additional help just email techblog2007@thaivista.net and I’ll help you through it.

If OpenDNS has a problem with this I don’t know what to say. I thought we were on the same side here, trying to help users in trouble and promote OpenDNS. If anyone is reading this let me state very clearly here that I consider any technical help I write here as public domain. Feel free to cut and paste the info to your heart’s content.

Now, on with today’s helpful (I hope) article, with added fluff words to further distinguish it from what OpenDNS’s own instructions. I apologize that my writing is not quite so tight as normal, but I’ve had enough hassles for one day:
Thai internet users these days don’t know what sites are censored, which ones are offline, and which are just unreachable due to poor quality IT skills and even worse quality control at many Thai internet service providers. Often a site is just fine but lousy DNS server configuration at the ISP means that even common sites like Gmail won’t resolve. This leads to frantic “Google is blocked!” posts on every Thai web forum to the point that it gets really annoying.

The way around this is to dump the DNS from the Thai ISP and use OpenDNS. This won’t get around site blocking, but it will help you reach sites outside of Thailand that don’t resolve well due to poor ISP DNS configuration.

Installation is very simple.

Instructions for Windows XP:

First, go to the Start menu, and open your control panel:
Select Network Connections from the list,

Click on your connection, which is most likely named Local Area Connection

Now click on the Properties button

On the next box, select Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and then click on the Properties button again

Now, before you do anything more, write down the numbers and settings you see in this box, in case you ever want to change back. Then set your settings to the following:

Preferred DNS Server: 208.67.222.222

Alternate DNS Server: 208.67.222.220

These next steps are optional, but will probably help:

Before going anywhere do the following;

Go to the start menu, and click on Run

In the box type command and hit enter

type the following command exactly: ipconfig/flushdns
Reboot your computer (regardless of whether or not you did the optional last step or not) and you should see a noticeable improvement.

Links for setup on other operating systems and windows versions are shown below, including GPRS, and XBox/Playstation Setup.

For Vista
http://www.opendns.com/start/windows_vista.php

For Windows 2000:
http://www.opendns.com/start/windows_2000.php

Macs:
http://www.opendns.com/start/mac.php

Unix/Linux:
http://www.opendns.com/start/unix.php

Mobile/GPRS:
http://www.opendns.com/start/mobile.php

Xbox/Playstation:
http://www.opendns.com/start/gaming.php