[RndTbl] Learning a little about /etc/hosts

[Mike Pfaiffer]

	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