adding 208.67.220.220 & 208.67.222.222, safe?

[M. Malone]

hello, I had problems with Adium Messenger connecting to MSN, so I found out that adding those two IP addresses to the DNS list made it work, what is the disadvantage of doing this?

 

[richard.mac]

thats the IPv4 addresses of OpenDNS which is perfectly safe. instead of using the DNS IP addresses that your ISP provides you can use the open source alternative which is OpenDNS.

i use it and i reckon it makes my browsing experiance quicker and it also auto-adds ".com" and ".org" etc to major sites.

have you been to opendns.com at all or know that youve setup OpenDNS?

 

[nemex]

Those are the IP's of OpenDNS, I would say that there are no disadvantages at all. You should pay a visit the OpenDNS web site.

Using these IP's overrides the DNS servers provided by your ISP, I've been using OpenDNS for quite long time and find this is faster and trouble free way to surf the net

 

[zaney]

I've been using OpenDNS for well over a year now, and have seen nothing but speed improvements and extra features. I quite often use the shortcuts it provides, they offer free stats on websites accesses and dns requests, it tells you when a websites DNS server is down, instead of just timing out, and corrects typos for you.

There are no disadvantages.

 

[richard.mac]

… they offer free stats on websites …

how do you do that?

 

[zaney]

how do you do that?

Go to http://www.opendns.com and click create free account at the top right. You then have to tell it your ip so it can track your stats, and provides other features like shortcuts, phishing protection, etc. If you have a dynamic ip you can use their free srevice DNS-O-Matic, unfortunately, I can't walk you through any further than this as I have a static IP.
It shouldn't be too much trouble though, I've found that it tends to walk you through most things, and provides help if you're unsure.