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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