Blocking ip's...

[Oddysey]

old salt;

First, to our forums!

Next, I'll try to answer your questions in quick fashion, so if something doesn't make sense, just ask for clarification. :P

A Hosts file is meant to take the place of a DNS server. A DNS server is meant to resolve "user friendly" textual addresses into network friendly numerical IP addresses. The proper format for a hosts file is:

domain-name.tld 123.123.123.123

It's easy to remember - you are submitting a name, and you want the numbers to be supplied to the browser (or whatever other program, such as ftp, email, etc.). In the short of things, this will alleviate the need to go outside of your machine, and onto the network, in search of a DNS server to resolve the address. Obviously, the HOSTS file can get large beyond all reason, so most people don't attempt to make it that big, they just use it for quick and dirty stuff, then let the DNS servers handle anything else.

Sadly, you can't just stick a HOSTS file into a proxo block list. It must be modified to remove the numerical IP addresses. The quick explanation for that is, Proxo doesn't care about address resolution, it's only looking at strings of text. If it finds a match, then (presuming we're talking about a block list here) the string of text is removed from further consideration, and the website in question is thereby effectively blocked. Simple, no?

Now, once we've stripped out the numerical stuff, we can look at the remaining list, and see that there's lots of room for improvement. For one thing, the HOSTS file must be explicit for each and every domain and sub-domain. For some domains, that's a lot of stuff to list out separately. Fortunately, Proxo lets us combine gobs of similar names by using the so-called "regexp", or regular expression. (Let's not get into that right now, just keep it in mind for future reference.)

The only other thing to remember is that Proxo only deals with Port 80 (when facing the outside world), and only addresses the HTTP protocol. That means that you'd still need a HOSTS file if you commonly use ftp, or an email client, etc. The upside is that your block list can be incorporated into many filters, and even parts of the overall list can be ignored or obeyed as dictated by various tests that Proxo can perform.

Lastly, you'd most likely add things to block to the file called URL Killfile.txt. You can reach that by right-clicking on the Proxo icon in the systray, mouse over the "Edit Blockfile" list, and choose the appropriate file to modify. Note that you can add entries to other files, such as your Bypass List.txt file, so named for obvious reasons. When you choose the Edit option, any file selected will open up in your default text editor, usually Notepad. But these are plain ordinary .txt files, so if you have some other editor chosen as the default action for opening a .txt file, that will be used instead of Notepad.

That was a lot of ground to cover, so I was quite brief <_< Keep asking questions, that's how we all learned how to use Proxo beyond what the Help file could tell us!


Oddysey