At the lab the teacher advocates using the Windows equivalent of the /etc/hosts file to prevent access to certain sites from classroom computers. He and I have been having an ongoing chat about this for a few months. I've been reading up on the way the file is used to redirect requests to a different address (eg. 127.0.0.1). Is there a difference in the way Windows parses the file compared to Linux?
One reason for the above question is I was thinking it might be useful to redirect requests to advertising sites to 127.0.0.1 to speed up access on days when things seem to crawl. One article I read on Digg suggested a lot of the wait time for web pages was due to slow and misconfigured ad servers. I found one site which has example files which are updated so often. I tried one and I got almost nothing when surfing the web. Using the file as a pattern I created a smaller version which works well with the chromium browser but fails to display text in firefox.
These are the lines I've added. Yes I know there are duplicates.
127.0.0.1 media.fastclick.com media.fastclick.net 127.0.0.1 *.tribalfusion.com a.tribalfusion.com 127.0.0.1 cdn.optmd.com 127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.com ad.doubleclick.net *doubleclick.net googleads.g.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 as.casalemedia.com 127.0.0.1 ads.adsonar.com 127.0.0.1 seeker.dice.com 127.0.0.1 townhall.com 127.0.0.1 s3.amazonaws.com 127.0.0.1 pixel.quantserv.com 127.0.0.1 st.blogads.com 127.0.0.1 *.rackspacecloud.com 127.0.0.1 js.adsonar.com 127.0.0.1 ads.pointroll.com
Would the "*" in the domain name cause problems? Like I said, I used the Windows file as an example.
Later Mike