parental control / web filter

[Siri Amrit Kaur]

On Wednesday 31 August 2005 10:06 am Alex Dean kindly wrote:
> I used a hosts file a while back which resolved a bunch of ad sites
> to 127.0.0.1.  This kept me from having to see lots of ads, but
> instead I saw lots of 404 errors.  Is this file you suggest the
> same approach or something else?
>
> Can one do includes in a hosts file?  So, for instance, I could
> break out the blocked sites into a bunch of smaller lists and
> selectively include the ones I wanted to block?

Depending on your browser and how it resolves errors, you may see 404 
error messages. Opera does it to me, but Konqueror and Mozilla don't.
There used to be a problem with old Netscape browsers, in that they 
choked on 127.0.0.1 for blocking sites in a hosts file. Changing the 
listing to 0.0.0.0 [servername] solved that problem. I do a find and 
replace to have all the listings say 0.0.0.0 instead of 127.0.0.1, 
except for 127.0.0.1 localhost. Don't know if that's necessary 
anymore, but I do it anyway...

I think you could bunch up the list any way you want to. It's already 
organized pretty well. If you or your kids use about.com, you'll have 
to unblock those lines. For these hosts files, I always look for 
images.osdn.com and images2.slashdot.org (I think that's what they 
are, anyway) and put # in front of those lines, because I like the 
little pictures in slashdot... Otherwise, I use it as is.

Siri Amrit