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I guess this is a little tutorial following what I’ve done this morning; should be handy since I couldnt find any good info in one place.

For those of you who dont know what opendns is: Google is your friend but basically it’s an alternative dns service from resolving addresses with some nifty extra features.

Now, lets get started, Tiscali are mean for the more savvy network dude and have locked the firmware on the SE587 to only include features that most users would want to use – unfortunately this does not include setting custom dns servers – meaning they are set automatically when the router is powered on and negiotiates an internet connection.

So using the web interface is out Lets fire up telnet

For telnet I used putty but you can use any telnet client (I’m not going into depth about how to connect to things using telnet – if you dont know how to do that, stop reading now).

Anyway; telnet into the router and you should see a nice connexant splash with some neat ASCII art, login with your normal username and password that you use for the web interface. There is a lot you can do with telnet here and I’ve spent hours going through different commands trying to get this to work properly – but in the end I discovered it can be done using the command:

dnsrelay

not dnsclient as I first thought – maybe it does work but it’s a lot of hassle and I couldnt get it to.

So type:

dnsrelay list servers

And you should see a few IP Addresses for DNS described as configured by PPP (Thats Tiscali)

Delete those by typing

dnsrelay clear servers

And add the new OpenDNS ones with

dnsrelay add server 208.67.220.220

dnsrelay add server 208.67.222.222

Now you need to save this so it’s not lost on reboot:

system config save

And finally:

system restart

Will reboot the router – wait a few minutes for it to come back up and telnet back in.

Re-issue the command:

dnsrelay list servers

Now you should see the 2 opendns manually configured IP’s as well as the ones PPP sent us. (You can change some config to stop PPP Sending it’s DNS but there was no need for me plus if left like this and for some reason opendns fails then the router should fallback – if you want to know how to stop auto discovery over PPP leave a comment)

Now to check that you are actually using opendns all you need to do is goto a random web address that you *mistyped* I like http://randomurl.cop – if you see the opendns search page then you’re all done and your router is now using opendns for its queries. If something went wrong just do:

dnsrelay clear servers

system config save

system restart

And the router will reboot and get new DNS from PPP again.

Oh…one more thing I did just for fun really I dont think its needed.

dnsrelay set landomain opendns.com

I think you can set this to any domain – the only reason I changed it was because I felt like it really.

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