How to: Set Up Open DNS On A Partner Router in Israel
OpenDNS (now a Cisco company) is an excellent service for consumers that can be used to provide (free) web filtering.
Additionally, by changing the DNS settings on your router, you — rather than your ISP — get to control what service you use to send DNS queries over. And sending queries to a DNS server is an essential action that anybody using the internet (unknowingly) engages in countless times every day.
(Domain Name System / DNS translates the alphanumeric website identifiers that we are all familiar with as URLs into public IP addresses that we would stand little chance of being able to memorize).
Using OpenDNS also:
- Might make your internet slightly faster.
- Allows you to avail of built-in phishing and malware protection.
I often see posts on Facebook groups in which mothers (or fathers) ask how to set up content filtering for their home.
Although there is certainly no shortage of parental control tools on the market — many of which I have reviewed for freelance clients and been impressed by — a very robust home content filtering system can be set up for free simply by changing your router’s default DNS settings over to OpenDNS Home.
Using OpenDNS at the router level — like a VPN — forces every device connecting through the Local Area Network( LAN), whether over Ethernet or WiFi, to send its DNS queries via OpenDNS on its journey, through your router, to the Wide Area Network (WAN) — which can be equated, for this purpose, with “the internet”.
This means that every device connecting to internet over your router — irrespective of what operating system it is running or whether it is a laptop or a smart TV box — will be “protected” by the filtering and protection which OpenDNS’s DNS servers provide.
This is therefore a nice solution if your children do not have mobile phones — or filtering for those devices is provided by their mobile network operator (MNO). Otherwise, the filtering can simply be circumvented by connecting over cellular. In this use case, device-level parental control solutions are the safer option.
Conversely, if all you need to do is make sure that anything connected over WiFi/ethernet has filtering — then this should provide an easy and elegant fix.
I am demonstrating how to configure OpenDNS on the Arris TG1652S which, at the time of writing, is the WiFi router which Partner is issuing to home users in Israel.
If you’re not sure that this is what you have then see if it looks like this:
1: Sign Up For Open DNS
You’ll obviously need to sign up for Home Free by Open DNS in order to begin using the service.
To do so visit this URL and create an account:
https://signup.opendns.com/homefree/
2: Add Your Home Network
Next, you will want to add your home network to OpenDNS.
We’re setting this up at the router level, so there’s no need to change the DNS servers in each computer’s network adapter settings unless you’re concerned that a child is going to be using a different accessible WiFi network, or the hotspot of an unfiltered phone, to circumvent the protection. (In which case you need to change the DNS settings on the computer and prevent them from being modified).
Simply follow the system prompts to create a local area network to protect:
In order to set up web content filtering, populate the dropdown under your network.
This will take you to a page like this:
Like any good web content filtering system you are able to filter content according to category — in which case any website that OpenDNS has categorized into a category will be blocked/allowed — and manually whitelist/blacklist URLs.
While you’re there, it’s a good idea to make sure that you also have phishing and malware/botnet protection enabled for the network:
You can even configure custom messages to display if somebody attempts to access a blocked category/website!
If you need to change these settings then you can do so at any time, from anywhere with an internet connection, by logging in to OpenDNS home. You do not need to be on the home network to apply any filtering changes or whitelist or blacklist URLs.
3: Log In To The Router
The router which Partner installed for you runs a configuration server which you can log in to in order to make edits like changing DNS settings (or enabling port forwarding to run a publicly accessible web server from your home!).
It is at: 192.168.0.1
This local IP address should remain static — so you may as well add it to your bookmarks folder and give it a name so that you can easily call it up by typing, like ‘Partner router’.
If you navigate to that URL in a browser you should get to this login screen.
If you’ve never been to this page before then there’s a very good chance that your username and password are:
Username: admin
Password: admin
Do I need to tell you that this is totally insecure?
If you don't change these, it is beyond simplistic for anybody within range of your WiFi network to log in to your router and do just about anything. So it's a very smart idea to change the password immediately after logging in.
After logging in, visit the LAN setup tab:
Then, scroll down to the DNS Override box.
Enable DNS override and enter the Open DNS servers as the primary and secondary DNS server IPs as follows:
At the time of writing these are:
208.67. 222.222
208.67. 220.220
Don’t forget to click the ‘apply’ button at the bottom of the page.
You can now leave the router configuration server.
4: Verify Everything is Routing
Flush your browser and DNS cache. How to do this varies a little depending on what operating system you are using on the computer.
Visit welcome.dns.com from your computer and any WiFi-connected device in your house.
If you’ve set up everything correctly then you should see the following.
Congratulations you are now enjoying free content filtering and faster internet for every device on your network!
Originally published at https://www.danielrosehill.co.il
