who is rotblitz, why does he know everything?
I see almost every post was answered by rotblitz for the last 10yrs... he seems to give detailed answers to every question... why does he know so much? :-)
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I'm an OpenDNS user since 2007, and I'm ICT expert. And I'm far from knowing everything. ;-)
In fact the questions being asked are almost the same twenty or so questions and their variations, being asked and answered again and again. But as it seems to be difficult for people to find the related stuff in the forum, they ask again, and I answer again. I have these few things off pat. Everybody else could do it.There used to be a handful more people here to help out others, but they disappeared over time, no idea why. Currently I seem to be the only one here. And this may be what you have observed here.
Now my question: who is ctang? Why does he ask for other users?
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Well, I have been using opendns on and off for a few years, mostly to remove ads in the past. But now I use ad guard dns for my own PC. Given covid-19 lockdown, I use opendns to turn on and off games, youtube, etc. for my kids computers when they need to study. I have an ubiquiti network, and I have a wifi network just for the kids with opendns.
So it is annoying that not all the recent game site are covered, and I was looking to make the voting process faster... also, I inevitably forget to turn on blocking at night for the next morning, so I was looking for an opendns API to program with... both look to be not easy. I applied to be a moderator to review tagging just now, but will see how long this process takes.
I suppose for home use, most of the blocking will be by parents. So as the kids grow up, the parents will move to a regular DNS. That probably explains why the other helpful people dropped off over the years. It's great rotblitz is still around to help all the new comers!
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Thanks for the introduction. I want to comment on a few things as follows:
"I use opendns to turn on and off games, youtube, etc. for my kids computers when they need to study."
This is not what OpenDNS is foreseen for neither it is recommended to do. The local caches successfully prevent from such settings switches to become reliably effective.
"I was looking for an opendns API to program with"
For the same reason there is no API for settings changes. The only API is for IP address updates.
"I was looking to make the voting process faster"
No problem. You raise a support ticket with all domain names and what category they should belong to. Similar tickets raised by me have usually been fulfilled within 3 business days.
(Also these points have been raised and answered a lot before.)
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"I use opendns to turn on and off games, youtube, etc. for my kids computers when they need to study."
This is not what OpenDNS is foreseen for neither it is recommended to do. The local caches successfully prevent from such settings switches to become reliably effective.
My steps are to disable the games category at night, and when the kids are done with work the next day, I enable games again. I can't speak for the OpenDNS design, but this approach works for me. DNS entries have a few minutes of TTL. So when the kids try to launch a game site in the morning, it is a new DNS lookup, and they get redirected to opendns error page or otherwise doesn't work. A few hours later, the kids are done with homework, I enable games category again, 3-5min later when DNS cache expires, the game sites are back.
So the loophole is that I can only prevent the initial attempt to launch the games when a DNS lookup is needed. If I forget to disable games at night, and the kids launched the games already, then disabling games on opendns is too late for games like Minecraft, as it only does a DNS lookup once. Of course, the parent workaround is to tell my kids to shut the games in progress...
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Then you got by chance short DNS TTLs for the domains being used here. There are domains which have a TTL of 86400 seconds (= 1 day) or at least several hours. Another enemy are the browser caches which even ignore DNS but straight present what's in it until the page/content expires. Also here you may have got web pages with a short expiration time by chance.
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