iblocklist2ipset =========

iblocklist2ipset is a small utility (really small, check out sources) to manage your favourite iblocklists with IPSets.

All it does, it converts lists from P2P format to the format compatible with ipset restore. Basic usage is following:

$ iblocklist2ipset generate \
    --ipset idiots
    "http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=usrcshglbiilevmyfhse&fileformat=p2p&archiveformat=gz" \
    > ~/.ipset
$ sudo ipset restore -f ~/.ipset

And you are done.

Now let's try to figure out why do you need it (and you need it).

Why do you need it

Let's imagine you are living in a country where DMCA makes sense and you want to make your seedbox safe but you can't use PeerGuardian or PeerBlock because it sucks on Linux so you decide to use iptables + ipset so...

Wait. It looks like a tool for... piracy? No, of course it is not. Let's start again.

Let's imagine you have some kind of server (bare metal or cloud VM) and you are running some mission critical software on it. You do not like botnets or EVIL HACKERS so want to block all of them to have some good feeling of safety. You heard about blocklists supplied by BlueTack and wanna use them.

But pure iptables import sucks. iptables actually is a pretty dumb tool for shiny netfilter and it sucks back and forth if you have a lot of rules (linear complexity is WTF in 2014, right?). You googled and found amazing ipset tool which integrates with iptables perfectly. Lovely. Let's use it.

So this tool just converts gzipped P2P lists into something you can give to ipset to restore, right? This is a missing tool and you definitely want it.

Why not to use PeerGuardian etc?

Good question. Actually they are pretty heavyweight and do almost nothing. It is just a firewall after firewall you already have installed. Look, basically combination of iptables, ipset and iblocklist2ipset with cron gives you the same features.

Moreover, I want to setup it once and do not worry about anything else. PeerGuardian is great if you are running this tool on desktop but not on a remote machine. Basically it looks as excess.

Examples

Well, to give you a feel of a tool, let's just execute it as is:

$ iblocklist2ipset -h
Small utility to convert p2p format of IP Blocklists to IPSet format.

Usage:
  iblocklist2ipset generate [options] BLOCKLIST_URL...
  iblocklist2ipset example_restore_ipset_job [options] IPTABLES_NAME IPSET_PATH
  iblocklist2ipset example_update_ipset_job [options] IPSET_PATH BLOCKLIST_URL...
  iblocklist2ipset -h | --help
  iblocklist2ipset --version

Options:
  -h --help                         Shows this screen.
  --version                         Shows version and exits.
  -i IPSET_NAME --ipset=IPSET_NAME  The name of IPSet set [default: blocklist]

To get IP blocklists please visit https://www.iblocklist.com/

So as you can see, usage is pretty straightforward. You can give it multiple blocklist URLs and it will generate you correct file you can restore with ipset restore. Let's do it with hijacked list:

$ iblocklist2ipset generate \
    "http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=usrcshglbiilevmyfhse&fileformat=p2p&archiveformat=gz" \
    > ipset_to_restore
$ head ipset_to_restore
create blocklist hash:net family inet hashsize 512 maxelem 536
add blocklist 81.22.152.0/23
add blocklist 91.220.163.0/24
add blocklist 206.209.80.0/20
add blocklist 204.187.254.0/24
add blocklist 103.12.216.0/22
add blocklist 193.0.146.0/23
add blocklist 208.90.0.0/21
add blocklist 110.232.160.0/20
add blocklist 91.213.148.0/24

Quite nice, isn't it? It calculated proper sizes for our list also. Now you can just import it

$ sudo ipset -f ipset_to_restore

And you are safe.

Not really, you need to setup iptables etc to get it work. No problems, if you are using the same configuration all the times, you can use example_restore_ipset_job and example_update_ipset_job commands to get some examples of the usage.

Real world example

I have my Raspberry Pi running some mission critical software (BTSync for example) and I want to use *hijacked* list from IBlockList.com.

I have a Raspbian up to date and now I want to use this shiny tool. First, let's install it.

$ sudo pip install iblocklist2ipset
$ sudo apt-get install -y ipset

(ipset is not bundled by default so install it before).

I want to store an ipset blocklist into /etc/ipset.rules.

$ iblocklist2ipset example_restore_ipset_job \
    -i hijacked blocklist \
    /etc/ipset.rules \
    > ~/scripts/ipset_restore.sh
$ chmod +x ~/scripts/ipset_restore.sh

Now we created shell scripts. On execution it will restore iptables and ipset configuration. Please be noticed that iblocklist2ipset understands virtualenv usage and script is generated with this knowledge also.

$ iblocklist2ipset example_update_ipset_job \
    -i hijacked \
    /etc/ipset.rules "http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=usrcshglbiilevmyfhse&fileformat=p2p&archiveformat=gz" \
    > ~/scripts/ipset_update.sh
$ chmod +x ~/scripts/ipset_update.sh

Lovely. Now we have a script to update. Let's update crontab then

@reboot   /home/user/scripts/ipset_restore.sh
@midnight /home/user/scripts/ipset_update.sh

Why not to store this stuff into iptables permanently? Well this is mostly because of ipset configuration. It loses it on reboot and it is not really trivial to restore it.

Probably one day I will do it but right now it has to be like this. At least it works for me.

Cheers.