Using Unbound as an Ad-blocker: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 03:46, 16 February 2024

Basic Components

You should have dnsmasq (or another DHCP server) and unbound both working on your network.

Setting up Unbound To Block/Refuse unwanted addresses

There are a number of freely available blacklists on the net. The installer mentioned above uses these lists by default:

Alternatively, there is a set of curated lists at https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts. There are various categories of lists there. The format of the file is a "host" (so you can put it in /etc/hosts and be done). We will use the hosts file format:

unbound needs to include the blacklists.conf file into its main configuration. To do so, we need to create the include file in the following format:

Contents of /etc/unbound/blacklists.conf

server:

local-zone: "bad-site.com" refuse
local-zone: "bad-bad-site.com" refuse
local-zone: "xyz.ads-r-us.com" refuse

Here is an example shell script to download the StevenBlack hosts file, and then format it for unbound:

#!/bin/sh

echo "server:" >/etc/unbound/blacklist.conf
curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts | \
        grep ^0.0.0.0 - | \
        sed 's/ #.*$//;
        s/^0.0.0.0 \(.*\)/local-zone: "\1" refuse/' \
        >>/etc/unbound/blacklist.conf

You can run this once, or as part of a periodic cron task.

In the /etc/unbound/unbound.conf, add the following line somewhere in the config:

Contents of /etc/unbound/unbound.conf

#include "/etc/unbound/blacklist.conf"

Reload unbound, and verify the config loads.

Dnsmasq configuration

Dnsmasq defaults to using the resolver in /etc/resolv.conf — if unbound is listening on 127.0.0.1, then have it use that as the resolver.

Alternatively, if unbound is running on another interface, or on a separate machine — use the dhcp-option configuration in dnsmasq:

dhcp-option=6,[ip-of-unbound-server]

Enjoy Ad-Free browsing!

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-== Background ==
-There is a fairly popular software product that acts as a DNS blocker for Advertisements and Malware.  It runs on the Raspberry <span style="color: red">Pi-</span> and claims to be a DNS Black <span style="color: red">Hole</span>.  It extends dnsmasq with filtering based on a downloadable blacklist.   There is a [https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/issues/9489 package request] for this software to run on Alpine Linux.
-The binary does compile on Alpine, however there is an extensive list of extraneous files, directories and packages that must be installed to get the modified version of {{Pkg|dnsmasq}} to start.  The "basic installer" is over 2600 lines of Bash code.
-Our goal is to get 80% of the functionality with 10% of the work.
 == Basic Components ==
@@ Line 15: / Line 7: @@
 There are a number of freely available blacklists on the net.  The installer mentioned above uses these lists by default:
 *https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts
-*https://mirror1.malwaredomains.com/files/justdomains
 *https://sysctl.org/cameleon/hosts
 *https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_tracking.txt
 *https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_ad.txt
-*https://hosts-file.net/ad_servers.txt
 Alternatively, there is a set of curated lists at https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts. There are various categories of lists there. The format of the file is a "host" (so you can put it in {{path|/etc/hosts}} and be done). We will use the hosts file format: