Quickstart guide

The quick start guide for Windows and *NIX varies.

Windows 10

• Install this folder as C:\BlockHash-1.0.01
• As non-admin, double click on regenerate.bat
• Right click on install.bat and run it as an administrator after inspecting the file to make sure it does not contain malware.
• In the Windows search bar, find and start up control panel
• Find “network and sharing center”
• Click on “change adaptor settings”
• Choose the adaptor used for internet access (Wi-Fi, wired, etc.)
• Right click on that adaptor and select “properties”
• Double Click on “Internet protocol version 4”
• Select “Use the following DNS server addresses”
• Put in “127.10.10.1” for the preferred DNS server
• Hit “OK” to make the changes stick

BlockHashMake and BlockHashRead

These are tools which generate a block hash, a list of binary strings along with hashing used to generate a compact database which can quickly see if a given binary string is in a given list.

This is useful for what I call “naughty lists”; a list of domains we do not want Deadwood to resolve. A current real-world list of over 200,000 domains would take around 200 megabytes of memory with Deadwood; by using this compact format, we can have the same data take up less than eight megabytes of data.

To use

Let’s have a hosts.txt (or simply hosts) file of names we do not want to resolve, where the undesirable names are given the IP 0.0.0.0.
To convert them in to a compact hash:

make # Compile the programs
cat naughty.hosts.txt | grep 0.0.0.0 | awk '{print $2}
  ' | fgrep '.' | ./blockHashMake 
./blockHashRead

This generates a file named bigBlock.bin which is a compact representation of a hosts file with names black listed.

Getting that naughty hosts.txt file

One possible source of a hosts file which can block naughty domains is here:

https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts