Warning, this article has been created more than 6 month ago. The information it contains may not be up to date. Advertising domain name blocking with Unbound Written by Mirabellette / 06 march 2018 / 6 comments I realized that Shaft made his script available here ... It is more powerful but also longer than this one because it makes some verification. To be honest, I think it is also better in some way. Feel free to combine them to make your own. Hello everyone, Today I want to talk to you about advertising in Internet and how to block a part of it with a domain name resolver like Unbound. You must be aware that there are thousands of way to track user's activities on internet. A good protection against this kind of things is to directly block the resolution of the domain which is trying to gather information about you. It is, of course, not perfect but it is a first good step to begin to reduce tracking about your online activity. Sometime I read journalduhacker.net, it is a website which gathering "good" article from French open source community. I found a very interesting article from Shaft about blocking a list of domain name with unbound. It is a very nice article which present how do it. It mention a very good trick to reduce the size of the ads list and the ram load of unbound. Thanks to him for his sharing. I just got a warning message with unbound, I don't know why but it works. I will investigate in it later and will of course tell you how to fix it. The warning message is like that: [1520173472] unbound[1259:0] warning: duplicate local-zone Unfortunately, I didn't find a script to modify ads list file from the source directly. They are commonly wrote like a host file. That's why I decided to made it by myself and to share it. I delete comments and other information in the original source file in a very strictly way. I do it in order to avoid any problem with Unbound. Some domain name could be deleted from the source list but with ~97400 domain name in it, I think the script I made works well enough. Most of ads list in the script are from Shaft article. I add this one too which is well reputed. Thanks to Sabre comment, I discovered that StevenBlack already provide an unique host list which contains AdAway, yoyo.org and MVPS hosts list. You can access to his list here. It is the one which is now in the script. vim /etc/unbound/unbound.conf.d/generate_domains_list_ban.sh # list of ads domain names array=( https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/alternates/fakenews-gambling-porn-social/hosts ) for i in "${array[@]}" do wget $i -O w grep -v " #\|<td>\|<p>\|<meta>\|<link>\|<title>\|href\|title=\|=\|<" w > adsList.txt rm w dos2unix adsList.txt # remove host syntax and clean file sed -i 's/0.0.0.0//g' adsList.txt sed -i 's/127.0.0.1//g' adsList.txt sed -i 's/localhost//g' adsList.txt sed -i 's/.localdomain//g' adsList.txt # remove commentary after domain name sed -i 's/#.*//' adsList.txt # remove tabulation character and carriage return sed -i "s/\t//g" adsList.txt sed -i "s/\r//g" adsList.txt # remove useless space sed -i 's/ //g' adsList.txt # remove empty lines sed -i '/^\s*$/d' adsList.txt # add prefix and suffix for unbound sed -i "s/.*/local-zone: \"&\" static/" adsList.txt cat adsList.txt >> adsListFinal.txt done # order list by name, it didn't cost a lot and could maybe increase unbound performance sort adsListFinal.txt -o adsListFinal.txt # remove duplicate ads domain in order to avoid warning with Unbound uniq adsListFinal.txt > adslist.txt # remove tempory files rm adsListFinal.txt adsList.txt service unbound restart You now have to tell to Unbound to load the advertise domain list. Add this line to /etc/unbound/unbound.conf and under the parameter server: # include: /YOUR_ADS_LIST_PATH include: /etc/unbound/unbound.conf.d/adslist.txt At the end of the process, I got a file of 4.1M with ~97400 domain names in it. Contrary to what we could think, It isn't slow. We just have to create a crontab job to be sure the list is oftenly updated. I think to update it each week is a good schedule. # 5 2 * * Sun /YOUR_GENERATE_ADS_LIST_SCRIPT_PATH 5 2 * * Sun /etc/unbound/unbound.conf.d/generate_domains_list_ban.sh .sh It took me hours to make the script and this article. I hope you will find it useful and interesting. Don't hesitate to comment it and share it. Thank you for reading. sources https://www.shaftinc.fr/blocage-pubs-unbound.html Social media If you find this article interesting, feel free to subscribe to my RSS flux and to follow me on Mastodon. Don't hesitate to share it if you think he could interest someone else.