Am I infected by openDNS?
Alright, I just bought my brand new Macbook pro and I’ve had it for about a month now. I’ve noticed that at school recently, certain websites have been blocked. It isn’t teh blocking of websites like porn that has me annoyed, its websites like Neopets, Tumblr, Reddit, Gmail and Hotmail.
When I go to Neopets, for example, it says this:
This domain is blocked.
Sorry, www.neopets.com has been blocked by your network administrator.
This site was categorized in: Games, Social networking, Forums/Message boards
Contact your network administrator
I have no idea where this is coming from – I don’t even have openDNS installed in my computer. Is it a virus? Did I pick up some malware from somewhere unknowingly? I’m my own network administrator (well, my mother is technically since she pays the bill).
Computer Information
Processor 2.9 GHz Intel Core i7
Version 10.8.3
OSX Mountain Lion
What’s going on?
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7 Answers
Sounds like this isn’t coming from you or your computer. It’s your school deciding what kinds of websites students can access over its network. This is pretty common on school campuses of all kinds. I’m surprised by gmail, though… are you sure that is being blocked?
See the admin, at school. They are a BLOCKED sites.
Clear your cookies and try a different browser.
My initial hunch is that it is being registered in your DNS cache so it keeps resolving the IP to the one saying it was blocked. On OS X it can take a long time to purge the cache.
If my hunch is correct you can do a few things to help.
The easiest is simply restarting. That will purge the cache.
The second is opening up the Terminal in Applications/Utilities and entering this:
sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder
And hit return. It will prompt for a password.
If doing either of those things is a total pain you can just use different browsers. Safari and Chrome use the OS X DNS cache.. Firefox doesn’t and uses one that is only for Firefox.
So you could browse from school in Safari and from home in Firefox.
I can’t vouch for this but it should work.. To turn off the systemwide DNS caching you could try
defaults write com.apple.safari WebKitDNSPrefetchingEnabled -boolean false
in the Terminal.. (that should all be on the same line)
That could slow your browsing down a bit since it will have to do a fresh DNS look-up each time. If it doesn’t work or is horrible this will undo it: defaults write com.apple.safari WebKitDNSPrefetchingEnabled -boolean true
Your school has installed some sort of a proxy server when you are on their network. That sucks. It’s not hard to get by this if you are at home – it means fiddling with your settings. They have some right to do this when you are at school; they have NO right to do this when you are at home.
OpenDNS is not a virus. OpenDNS is a very good thing.
OpenDNS can be set for low protection (keep me away from virus and phishing sites) or very high protection (keep me away from anything inappropriate for young children).
Basically, for every web site you visit, your computer asks OpenDNS if your settings allow that site.
Anyway, here’s how to see if your computer is using OpenDNS at home.
http://use.opendns.com/#mac
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