This year we’re throwing a big bash to show our appreciation for you. If you live in the San Francisco area — or want to come to San Francisco for the event — join us at DNA Lounge on Wednesday, July 29. There’ll be good people, good music and good drinks. We even have some surprises for you up our sleeves.

Register for the party here. Admission is free. We hope to see you there!

In parting, thanks to SysAdminDay.com for these words. If they strike home, we really hope to see you in San Francisco:

A sysadmin unpacked the server for this website from its box, installed an operating system, patched it for security, made sure the power and air conditioning was working in the server room, monitored it for stability, set up the software, and kept backups in case anything went wrong. All to serve this webpage.

A sysadmin installed the routers, laid the cables, configured the networks, set up the firewalls, and watched and guided the traffic for each hop of the network that runs over copper, fiber optic glass, and even the air itself to bring the Internet to your computer. All to make sure the webpage found its way from the server to your computer.

A sysadmin makes sure your network connection is safe, secure, open, and working. A sysadmin makes sure your computer is working in a healthy way on a healthy network. A sysadmin takes backups to guard against disaster both human and otherwise, holds the gates against security threats and crackers, and keeps the printers going no matter how many copies of the tax code someone from Accounting prints out.

A sysadmin worries about spam, viruses, spyware, but also power outages, fires and floods.

When the email server goes down at 2 AM on a Sunday, your sysadmin is paged, wakes up, and goes to work.

A sysadmin is a professional, who plans, worries, hacks, fixes, pushes, advocates, protects and creates good computer networks, to get you your data, to help you do work — to bring the potential of computing ever closer to reality.

So if you can read this, thank your sysadmin — and know he or she is only one of dozens or possibly hundreds whose work brings you the email from your aunt on the West Coast, the instant message from your son at college, the free phone call from the friend in Australia, and this [blog].

We also updated our System Status page today to show you what I mean. We’ll be bringing up a new location in Amsterdam in the next couple months and we’re working on a strategy to bring OpenDNS closer to our users in Asia.

I’ve brought back the dancing banana to help celebrate this awesome achievement. I remember when we did 100 million requests total in a single month and how awesome *that* was. Today we’re handling over 200,000 requests per second at peak load. Simply awesome. My hats off to our great ops and engineering teams and thanks to all of you who have helped us grow over the last three years.

When we introduced you to the Domain Tagging system, which powers our Web content filtering service, we explained it was better than any other filtering system for three reasons:

1. It’s more comprehensive. The system has more than 50,000 people submitting and voting on sites. This is in stark contrast to a mere handful of people employed for this job by security companies offering Web content filtering.

2. It’s faster-moving. New Web sites and changes to existing Web sites are constantly being published to the Internet. Other Web content filtering systems update only once nightly, or even less frequently, and therefore fail to catch and categorize everything right away. The OpenDNS community is always adding and tagging sites, so you benefit from real-time updates.

3. It’s free to use. No longer are you forced to pay top dollar to keep your network safe and secure.

I talk to you, our customers and our community, every day and hear how much you value a Web content filtering system that works reliably and keeps the people on your network safe online. Whether it’s businesses, school districts, Managed Service Providers (MSPs), hospitals or households, everyone appreciates the service our community powers and OpenDNS provides.

In the coming months, we’ll be working be working on improvements to the Domain Tagging System that encourage more voting. Perhaps even some prizes for the most active and accurate voters… But in honor of this milestone, take a few minutes today and vote on some domains.

Over the past few years we’ve been approached more and more frequently by other organizations wanting to integrate the OpenDNS service or some part of the OpenDNS service – our Web content filtering, or our faster, more reliable DNS – into their products and services. In many cases, their customers are actually asking for OpenDNS integration to make it easier for techies and non-techies alike to use our services. We’ve heard the same from you, too – many of you have asked us directly to work with router companies and make OpenDNS more accessible and easier to set up.

In January we announced a partnership with NETGEAR, a world-class router manufacturer, to deliver Web content filtering and phishing protection to its customers. And later this summer many new model NETGEAR routers will offer parental controls powered by OpenDNS, giving NETGEAR customers around the world an easy way to use our service.

And so today I am pleased to introduce Best Path Networks, a new arm of OpenDNS that will work to provide our services to partners. Each integration and partnership will be different – customized to provide value to different audiences. Where one partner elects to integrate and provide our Web content filtering and phishing protection, another partner might want only our faster, more reliable DNS, and sometimes a partner may choose to white-label the service as their own – and that’s okay with us.

Making OpenDNS available to more people is good for the Internet. It means more people are protected from phishing and other nefarious activities, and it means more people have a choice in their DNS. It also means the Internet performs more reliably and people are forced to tolerate fewer outages. It also means we’ll continue spending resources on improving and extending the OpenDNS network for you since all of our partners will be utilizing our existing (and growing) infrastructure.

We know you use OpenDNS because you love the service, so we’ve taken specific steps to ensure using OpenDNS will always be your choice. We also want to make sure you know we won’t form a partnership with any organization that limits your ability to use OpenDNS as you do today.

It’s been three years since we started OpenDNS and it seems like we’ve accomplished a lot, but we’ve only just begun innovating – we have a roadmap of great new features we’ll continue to deliver to you throughout the course of this year that we’ll announce here on this blog. As always, we welcome feedback – in Idea Bank, our forums or right here in the comments.

Here’s how it works: When an authoritative DNS provider suffers an outage, all of the Web sites it provides service to are taken offline. They’re inaccessible for everyone on the Internet. But no longer for OpenDNS users. Our servers will now immediately look for the last known good address for the site in our caches, and use that to load the site. So effectively OpenDNS users will be able to access Web sites that appear down for everyone else. For our millions of users at businesses, schools and libraries around the world, saving them Internet access interruptions and the time they waste is invaluable.

Authoritative DNS outages happen frequently and can be a big problem. Just a few weeks ago, it’s reported that major authoritative DNS provider UltraDNS suffered an outage that took Salesforce.com, Amazon.com and Petco.com offline for several hours. In such a case, SmartCache would fix the inaccessibility problem and allow people to visit the sites through the outage.

This is just the latest in a long series of DNS innovations we’ve developed and passed on to you. Most recently it was blocking the Conficker worm from phoning home. By blocking the domain names the worm used, we were and continue to be able to protect people around the globe. Trust that we’re committed to continue to innovate and give you easy-to-use services that make your Internet experience better.

SmartCache is available immediately as an opt-in feature. Just log in to your dashboard and look for the check box in your Advanced Settings. For those tech geeks, this only applies to queries where the authoritative server hands back a SERVFAIL response code in addition to any query that simply goes unanswered.

Let us know what you think of the new feature in the comments here.

The Forbes feature first. The article looks at OpenDNS in the wake of Dan Kaminsky’s 2008 discovery of a major flaw in the global Domain Name System. (We saw many of you start using OpenDNS initially to protect your networks from it, only to fall in love with all of the things OpenDNS does.) The writer, Andy Greenberg, paints a colorful picture of Dan and OpenDNS founder David Ulevitch first meeting at BlackHat in 2001, and even then collaborating to make the Internet better. Fast forward to 2008 and Dan recommends everyone use OpenDNS as it’s one of the only DNS services insusceptible to the major flaw he found. Oh, and this story will be in the upcoming print issue, so keep your eyes peeled.

Next the San Jose Mercury News feature. This one ran on the front page of the paper’s technology section. It’s written for a consumer audience, explaining how OpenDNS works fundamentally, and how it makes the Internet safer, faster, smarter and more reliable. The writer, Elise Ackerman, definitely did her homework. She cites several school districts in her jurisdiction using the service - Menlo Park City School District, Mountain View-Whisman School District and Fremont Unified School District to name a few. She even interviewed the network administrator from La Honda-Pescadero Unified School District.

As always, we post media mentions of OpenDNS on our Web site here, so if you like to read up on what people have to say about us, check back often.

As David mentioned here, we’re in a unique position as your DNS provider of choice to block the worm at the DNS level and prevent it from phoning home. We’re also in a unique position to tell you, based on DNS queries coming from your account, if your network has been infected with Conficker. Log into your OpenDNS account now and you’ll see a banner indicating you either have Conficker or you don’t. This is a tremendously valuable service, and representative of a key innovation on the DNS. If you have friends or colleagues not using OpenDNS yet, we urge you to recommend the service.

Even though we prevent the worm from phoning home, we advise everyone with Conficker to run the disinfection tool. Microsoft offers a great one here.

Also today we’re sharing data about geographic distribution of the worm’s C-varient to date. This information is based on OpenDNS data alone, so is not necessarily representative of overall geographic Conficker distribution.

We’ll continue blocking Conficker for all of our users, through our on-by-default Botnet Protection feature. And we’ll keep you posted with updates about the virus, if/when we have them, on this blog.

As your DNS provider of choice, we’re in a unique and advantageous position to help keep our users safe. OpenDNS has kept our users safe from Conficker for the past several months by blocking the domains it uses to phone home. (We’ve seen lots of you start using our service to protect your networks from the worm.)

The latest variant of Conficker is now churning through 50,000 domains per day in an attempt to thwart blocking attempts. Consider this: at any given time we have filters that hold well over 1,000,000 domains (when you combine our phishing and domain tagging filters). 50,000 domains a day isn’t going to rock the boat.

So here’s our update: OpenDNS will continue to identify the domains, all 50,000, and block them from resolving for all OpenDNS users. This means even if the virus has penetrated machines on your network, its rendered useless because it cannot connect back to the botnet. If you want to disinfect your computer we recommend you check out the tools from our friends over at Kaspersky Lab.

If you’re already using OpenDNS, you’re all set. We’re protecting you automatically. If you’re not yet, simply set up a free account here and secure your network.

This year will no doubt be more of the same. When the 2009 tournament starts one week from today, more than 7 million people are expected to tune in, eating your bandwidth and slowing your network down. The good news is you can easily block the sites that live stream the games with OpenDNS. Then, if you so choose, unblock them when the tournament’s over.

Just log into your account, and go the Settings tab. On the Content Filtering page, scroll down to the bottom and add http://mmod.ncaa.com to your “always block” list.

The first announcement is about the comeback - and improvement - of the much-loved and anticipated Stats System. Stats are invaluable to network administrators: they give you insight into what’s happening on your network coupled with the tools to do something about it. The old system, which was overloaded and barely processing our nearly 9 billions DNS queries per day, was down for awhile as we made improvements. Sometimes you have to take a step back in order to take three steps forward. Thanks to everyone for your patience as we got it back up and running. I hope you’ll find it was worth the wait.

New functionality in the Stats System includes the comeback of the Top Domains report. This feature gives you a list of the top Web sites visited from your network and affords you unique insight into where your resources are being consumed, and which inappropriate or unsafe websites people are seeing. Top Domains now integrates directly with our Web content filtering system. This means you can look at Top Domains, see something you want blocked and block either the site or the category it fits into with a single click. (Example: Facebook.com is one of your Top Domains. Without leaving that screen you can block with Facebook.com or “Social Networks.”) Check out this screencast, narrated by the engineer who built it, Richard Crowley, to see the new system in action.

The second announcement is significant to all OpenDNS users as well as the entire Internet community. Today we’ve rolled out a way for you to see if Conficker is living on your network. The Conficker worm, also called Downadup and Kido, is massive. Some estimates of how many PCs are compromised are as high as 10 million. What’s interesting about this particular virus is that it uses the Domain Name System in a unique way: Conficker contains an algorithm that checks 250 new domains per day for instructions on what it should do. This puts us in a unique position to keep you safe since we’re in the unique position of providing insight and intelligence into your DNS service. We’ve teamed with Kaspersky Lab to identify those 250 daily domains, and stop resolving them. This means if you’re using OpenDNS, Conficker will do your network no damage. Yet another reason for your friends and colleagues to make the switch. While OpenDNS represents just a tiny drop in the sea of the Internet users today, we think this is a smart move forward.

To find out if Conficker has penetrated your network, simply log in to your account and select Stats on the left sidebar. From there choose Blocked Domains and filter “only domains blocked as malware.” This will generate a list of malware sites your network has attempted to connect with.

This is just the beginning, folks. We’ve got a year’s worth of new features we’re cranking hard on to make your network better performing and more secure. Stay tuned…