Where do you get the filter list to modify /etc/host ? Or Is there a easier way ...

mih · on Jan 20, 2015

Quite a few sources actually. Beware, some of them can be too restrictive. If the hosts file is too big, it can also impact performance.

http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.zip

(too restrictive) http://hosts-file.net/download/hosts.zip

(ad-servers n tracking only) http://hosts-file.net/ad_servers.asp

http://pgl.yoyo.org/as/serverlist.php?hostformat=hosts&showi...

http://sysctl.org/cameleon/hosts.win

http://www.malwaredomainlist.com/hostslist/hosts.txt

edwintorok · on Jan 20, 2015

http://adaway.org/hosts.txt

I also replace 127.0.0.1 with 0.0.0.0 and duplicate each entry to have it for IPV6 as well, as in this script except I don't do the iptables rules: https://gist.github.com/teffalump/7227752

chippy · on Jan 20, 2015

curious about the performance issue. Would the impact on performance be larger than a similarly sized block list in a browser plugin?

I have a netbook, so always want to keep an eye out on performance.

I wonder if there's a GUI application which enables these hosts sources to be tweaked, searched, whitelisted etc

mih · on Jan 20, 2015

I use this on Windows. For a large hosts file (several megabytes), I find the DNS client service hangs until it reads the whole file. Further, there is also a noticeable delay in the order of a few seconds until the hostname is resolved. For smaller files, I find there is no noticeable lag. Can't offer you any numbers though.

Hostsman (http://www.abelhadigital.com/hostsman) on windows is the my choice of a frontend for hosts management. It's free but not open source.

marios · on Jan 20, 2015

Slower DNS responses with big hosts file is something to be expected.

The solution is to feed the data to a DNS caching resolver such as unbound or dnsmasq, as I have explained in reply to UserRights.

Answering here also to point out I originally implemented this on a 5y old netbook (Atom CPU, 1GB RAM) because I tend to have a lot of tabs open in firefox, and ABP's memory usage quickly becomes noticeable, and then comes the swapping. Running unbound+nginx scales remarquably well, without hogging too much memory at startup. (Sorry, I don't have access to the netbook right now to report real numbers).

Dosenpfand · on Jan 20, 2015

I use this list and it works quite well: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/