performance impact of large /etc/hosts files

[Alex Zbyslaw]

Nikos Vassiliadis wrote:

>On Wednesday 12 December 2007 04:06:01 Erich Dollansky wrote:
>  
>
>>>There's no clean solutions to getting different lookups per-user that
>>>I
>>>      
>>>
>>The clen solution is hosts.
>>    
>>
>
>But hosts is operating system-wide.
>
>Both ipfw and pf support tables, which is what you
>want, large sets or unrelated (addresses|networks).
>Both of them support UID matching as a target
>(caution: this feature is not mpsafe on FreeBSD-6).
>  
>
I don't understand how you think any firewall would do this.  Firewalls 
will block based on IP addresses, whereas what I do (pointing numerous 
ad sites at a local apache vhost) works based on names.  I have no clue 
if the ad sites share IP addresses with anything else, nor do I care; 
nor do I care if some ad site has 50 different IP addresses because I 
never resolve the real IP.

To take a random, made up example:

ads.useful.site = 10.1.1.1
www.useful.site = 10.1.1.1

Using hosts (or DNS) I can make ads.useful.site instead = 192.168.1.1

or

ads.useful.site = 101.1.1 -> 10.1.1.255

but I'm going to spend *forever* before I get all those IP addresses 
from a round-robin DNS entry to put into some ipfw table, and if any of 
those addresses also hosts the main site, I end up blocking that too.

I don't see how a firewall is appropriate for this (hosts.allow, 
likewise).  The point of the exercise is to never even contact the ad host.

If I've misunderstood something about your approach, please enlighten me.

--Alex