Topic: ad blocking with hosts file? Disadvantages?

[Andy MacDonald]

I've got bannerfilter going, and it's pretty good. Unfortunately, I need to get rid of a few other servers every now and then.
Is anyone using the hosts file to kick things back to 127.0.0.1?

I did this once with a windows host and crippled it performance wise. It was a mighty big blocking list though.
Damn thing took near 15 minutes to boot.....

[RayG]

Have you looked at the SquidGuard addin ? It has a half dozen seperate categories of things to block, each in their own directory. The list of blocked sites is updated on a daily basis. There are also two seperate categories for sites you want to block manually and sites you want to always allow. You can block or allow based on domain name, IP address, URL, and regular expressions. I've used this package for ad and popup control since SME 5.1.2.

The package is basicly just configuration control for the Squid transparent proxy already installed and in use on your SME gateway.

DansGuardian is also supposed to be very good too but I have not used it myself.

[Andy MacDonald]

Hi Ray.
I eventually pasted a whole lot of known adservers into my local data config file for bannerfilter.
It is now over 1200 domains etc long.
Then I hit the update.sh script and 99 percent of hits that were ad related in my SARG log, no longer appear...

The few that make it through the next week are added to the list.

[Doug M.]

Just make sure your adding your personal ones to the personalldata file otherwise the bannerfilter upate.sh will overwrite your work.

[Andy MacDonald]

Local data / personal data  --- same connotation. You've actually got to use the update script to pick up the changes in the personal data file anyway.