Re: [RndTbl] Learning a little about /etc/hosts

I don't know the answer to your question, but it seems easy enough to find out:

(Windows XP SP3)

C:>ping foo.hhjjhhjjhh.com Ping request could not find host foo.hhjjhhjjhh.com. Please check the name and try again. C:>echo 127.0.0.1 *.hhjjhhjjhh.com > c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts C:>ping foo.hhjjhhjjhh.com Ping request could not find host foo.hhjjhhjjhh.com. Please check the name and try again. C:>echo 127.0.0.1 foo.hhjjhhjjhh.com >> c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts C:>ping foo.hhjjhhjjhh.com Pinging foo.hhjjhhjjhh.com [127.0.0.1] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 127.0.0.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128 ...

I'll leave it as an exercise to you to test the same on Linux.

BTW, why are you blocking Amazon S3?

Sean

On Sat, Aug 7, 2010 at 1:04 PM, Mike Pfaiffer high.res.mike@gmail.comwrote:

   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

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