Squid "Anti-Ad" Server Blocker

The proxy server Squid (Squid Web Proxy Cache) has the ability to read a list of ips from a text file and block those ips from clients using the proxy. This is perfect for blocking ad servers for your internal clients. Your clients in turn will not have to be bothered with ads, they will save bandwidth and you wont have to worry as much about that user that will click on any shiny animated object in front of them. This script works similarly to SafeSquid, but gives you full control of the list and allows for increased flexability.

Getting Started

The following three(3) lines need to be added anywhere in your squid.conf file. We are going to assume your squid.conf file is in /etc/squid/ and you will be putting your list of ad servers called ad_block.txt in the same directory.

NOTE: If you need assistance with Squid check out the Calomel.org Squid proxy "how to". You can also setup a proxy auto configuration (PAC) file in the browser using our Proxy Auto Config for Firefox (PAC) "how to".

The first line below is a comment and reminder where you are getting your list from. The second line is the regular expression that reads the "/etc/squid/ad_block.txt" file when the squid daemon loads or when you reconfigure the daemon with "squid -k reconfigure". The next line instructs squid to deny access to those ips in the list from clients using the squid proxy. The last line (deny_info) is optional, it just sends back a tcp rest to the client instead of sending an infomational error page. You may want this option if you do not want clients provided with any ifo about your proxy or why the error was triggered.

## disable ads ( http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/ )
acl ads dstdom_regex "/etc/squid/ad_block.txt"
http_access deny ads
#deny_info TCP_RESET ads

Fetching the list of ad servers

Now we need to fetch the list of ad servers and format the downloaded file into a list squid can recognize. The following script will do this for us. The script first downloads the ad server list from pgl.yoyo.org and saves it to /tmp/temp_ad_file using wget. Then the file is grep'd to remove unwanted characters like html text and the output is saved to /etc/squid/ad_block.txt. Lastly, squid is "reconfigure"d so the new ad servers list is loaded and then the temporary ad file is deleted from /tmp.

#### Calomel.org  ad_servers_newlist.sh 
#
## get new ad server list
/usr/local/bin/wget -O /tmp/temp_ad_file \
   http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php?hostformat=squid-dstdom-regex;showintro=0

## clean html headers out of list
cat /tmp/temp_ad_file | grep "(^|" > /etc/squid/ad_block.txt

## refresh squid
/usr/local/sbin/squid -k reconfigure

## rm temp file
rm -rf /tmp/temp_ad_file

Automating with cron

Lastly, you may want to setup and cron job to get the latest list every few days. The site you get the ad list from (pgl.yoyo.org) updates their ips every 3 days or so on average. With a cron job running you can make sure you have the latest list. Below is a cron job line to get the ad servers list every 3 days at 5:35am (0535).

#minute (0-59)
#|   hour (0-23)
#|   |    day of the month (1-31)
#|   |    |   month of the year (1-12 or Jan-Dec)
#|   |    |   |   day of the week (0-6 with 0=Sun or Sun-Sat)
#|   |    |   |   |   commands
#|   |    |   |   |   |
#### refresh squid's anti-ad server list
35   5    *   *   */3 /scripts_dir/ad_servers_newlist.sh >> /dev/null 2>&1