stevesearle.com - Techie Stuff - Using BIND and Apache to Block Online Adverts

If you're fed up with anoying adverts flashing away on web pages that you are trying to read, the following technique can be used to replace them with some plain text, served locally, so that it also saves bandwidth.

Essentially this consistis of:

Setting up a simple webpage to replace all the adverts.
Configuring Apache to have a virtual host container for this web page.
Redirectng any request to this virtual host to the page we have created.
Download a list of most ad sites to be included in your BIND config file
Creating a zone file to redirect any requests for advets to your virtual host

Set up a simple webpage to replace the adverts

Create directory /var/www/blocked.

# cd /var/www
# mkdir blocked

Create index.html inside this directory as follows.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
  <title>Advert blocked by stevesearle.com</title>
</head>
<body>
  <h1>
    Blocked!
  </h1>
  <p>
    Advert blocked by stevesearle.com
  </p>
</body>
</html>

Configure Apache to have a virtual host container for the "blocked" page

Add the following to /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf.<\p>

...
NameVirtualHost blocked

<VirtualHost blocked>
    ServerAdmin webmaster@stevesearle.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/blocked
    ServerName blocked.stevesearle.com
    ErrorLog logs/blocked.stevesearle.com-error_log
    CustomLog logs/blocked.stevesearle.com-access_log common
    ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /var/www/blocked/cgi-bin/
    Options ExecCGI Includes
    <Directory "/var/www/blocked">
        AllowOverride All
        Options Includes ExecCGI FollowSymlinks
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
    AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
    AddHandler cgi-script .pl
    AddHandler server-parsed .shtml .html
</VirtualHost>

Redirect any request to the page we have created

Set up a rewrite rule for all requests to this domain to be redirectected to index.html. Create /var/www/blocked/.htaccess as follows.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^.*$ index.html

Download a list of ad sites for the BIND config file

Download a list of advert domamains. This should be saved as /var/named/chroot/etc/ads.list. Then add the following to /var/named/chroot/etc/named.conf.

...
include "/etc/ads.list";

Create a BIND zone file to redirect any requests to advert servers to the virtual host

Create /var/named/chroot/var/named/pz/null.zone.file as follows.

$TTL 3D
@       IN      SOA     magpie.stevesearle.com. steve.stevesearle.com. (
                        200706171       ; Serial
                        8H              ; Refresh
                        2H              ; Retry
                        4W              ; Expire
                        1D)             ; Minimum TTL
                NS      magpie.stevesearle.com.
                TXT     "Steve Searle's local ad blocking zone"
                A       127.0.0.1
*       IN      A       192.168.126.51

Restart BIND, and any requests for any of the domains listed in the ads.list will bne redirected to the local page you have created, saving bandwidth and often being far less distracting when viewing web pages.

# service named restart