Laurent Bercot:

 What I do is:

 *

    run a tinydns on another IP address (if you only have 1 nic, you
    can still attribute several IPs to it)

 *

    fill that tinydns with sink data for the things I want to block

 *

    configure my dnscache to query my internal DNS server for the
    zones I want to block. In your case, if you tell your dnscache
    that your internal DNS server is authoritative for the
    facebook.com zone, any query for graph.facebook.com will go to
    your internal server.

 *

    no /etc/hosts manipulation needed.


This is the third-best way to achieve this. The second-best way is a variant. In the third-best way there's still a lot of setup and on-going maintenance involved in the servers/ directory of the dnscache service, as one adds/removes domain names. In the second-best way, tinydns also serves up the root of the DNS namespace, delegating to the next level of servers in the same way that the public root content DNS servers do, and dnscache is simply configured to start with that root content server. There's no further on-going dnscache work in this approach, just the maintenance of the entries in the tinydns database.

A side-benefit is that this also makes your traffic to the root content DNS server entirely private and not susceptible to network outages. Whilst it applies less to real existing domain names, this in particular helps with some of the other stuff that tends to leak out in DNS lookups (caused by a whole bunch of things from the DNS client library search path, through non-existent top-level domains, to applications passing human-form IP addresses to DNS lookup), which would otherwise end up as negative responses from the public root content DNS servers. Moreover, properly dnscache should always be providing split-horizon DNS service for address-to-name lookups of all of your RFC 1918 IP addresses, and name-to-address lookups of any internal subdomains for your LAN(s), which are both more private stuff that the outside world should never see. This also can achieve that, as a further side-benefit, simply with further additions to the tinydns database, and without need to configure split-horizon in dnscache.

In the service bundles that accompany the nosh toolset, I supply a tinydns@127.53.0.1 service bundle that does all of these. Its Makefile populates its database with RFC 1918 IP address stuff, the root data pulled from ICANN, and administrator-controlled extra stuff (where the re-pointed wildcard domain name data would go).

* http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/guide/services/djbdns.html

The best way, however, is to realize that using the DNS for this breaks every non-HTTP(S) protocol, and do this for HTTP(S) only. I've myself done this in two ways in the past: with a custom proxy.pac/wpad.dat file that the WWW browsers load, redirecting all of the relevant domains in ECMAScript in the WWW browser itself; and with a fully-fledged proxy HTTP server that I wrote, that used a database of URL patterns (not just domain names) and how they should be handled in HTTP, including (as one of several possibilities) rewriting them into temporary redirects to a small static content HTTP server that served up coloured rectangles as placeholder images amongst other things. These are the basic approaches of most non-toy WWW advert-blockers, you will find.

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