Blocking undesirable domains using BIND

[Kevin Kinsey]

Maxim Khitrov wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm currently setting up a new firewall for my home network using
> FreeBSD 7. The firewall will also act as our local name server
> (authoritative for the local domain, and caching for everything else).
> One of the things I'd like to do with it is use BIND to block various
> undesirable domains (ad servers, malicious sites, etc.). The plan is
> to have a separate BIND config file which is included in the main one.

Just a question, and I'm not trying to cast doubt on your plan; I'm 
curious why using BIND for this purpose instead of a proxy, which is
a more typical application as I understand it?

Again, I'm not trying to convince you otherwise or say that using
BIND is a bad idea.  It's just that I'm curious because we use
Squid for this sort of thing, and I was wondering why BIND instead?

Kevin Kinsey

> In that file I map all the blocked domains to either the empty zone or
> perhaps my local web server that's just serving a blank page for any
> request. Haven't decided which way is better yet. This file is updated
> periodically (once a week maybe) and BIND is then told to reload the
> config. That's the plan as it stands now, eventually I hope to add a
> web interface to the system for adding and removing blocked domains.
> 
> My question for you guys is if know any _reliable_ sources for getting
> that list of domains in the first place? I currently use the hosts
> file on all my machines, which is about 2MB in size and hasn't been
> updated in several years. I'll definitely import all of those entries
> myself, but it would be good if I could periodically pull an updated
> list from somewhere else. The following site has a pretty decent
> collection of ad servers, though it's a bit short compared to what I
> already have: http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/. It even provides the
> list in a BIND format, meaning that I don't need to do any additional
> processing with it. Just fetch the page and reload BIND. This,
> however, is not one of my requirements. I'm perfectly happy getting
> just a list of the domains (in any format), and then processing them
> into a BIND config file myself. Just need good sources. What are your
> recommendations?
> 
> - Max


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