AB-Solution - The Ad Blocking Solution

[Chiny91]

I've made the change to "Use rotate-logs.add as in above post" and all appears to function correctly. I've also backed off the updating to once every 10 minutes which still gives a nice feel to the rolling numbers in the Mac menu bar.

I will probably combine my 2 scripts into 1 (since I decided against running the cron job on the router). To do this effectively, I will need to time the rotate-logs.add to see how long it takes on my router. Any idea of what time I should expect ?

 

[thelonelycoder]

I've made the change to "Use rotate-logs.add as in above post" and all appears to function correctly. I've also backed off the updating to once every 10 minutes which still gives a nice feel to the rolling numbers in the Mac menu bar.

I will probably combine my 2 scripts into 1 (since I decided against running the cron job on the router). To do this effectively, I will need to time the rotate-logs.add to see how long it takes on my router. Any idea of what time I should expect ?

The addon rotate-logs.add with the 'none' parameter only takes a second or so to run.
It looks for an existing marker. When found, it counts the relevant requests from it, deletes the old marker and sets a new one at the end of the dnsmasq.log file and sends the SIGUSR.
If no marker is found in that file, the counting is done and a marker is written to it, sending a SIGUSR.

 

[thelonelycoder]

For my 500th milestone post on the Small Net Builders Forum site, I thought of no better place than to post in the AB-Solution thread.

I not only want to thank @RMerlin for the great firmware and support he provides. But I also want to thank @thelonelycoder for the awesome product known as AB-Solution. ASUS Merlin Firmware, when combined with AB-Solution, have super charged my router and have provided a more enjoyable web surfing experience for myself, family members and the individuals at the sites I support. In addition, @thelonelycoder provides excellent support, not only in this thread, but in others as well. If you have AB-Solution installed on your router, I encourage you to express your gratitude and appreciation by making a donation to the @thelonelycoder via PayPal, no matter what amount. A link to the donation page can be found on the AB-Solution website https://www.ab-solution.info/. And while you are at it, make a donation to @RMerlin as well!

Congrats @Xentrk to your 500th. Thank your for being around and actively contributing to all the coders and users here.
It's a pleasure to work with you, especially in the (private) beta testing threads for AB.

It warms my heart hearing your praise and I thank you for your kind words.
What more can I say: Let's raise our glasses to all of the contributors and providers on this board. For that the ideas flow and the keyboard speak of our actions.
Prost, Santé and cheers, stay active, the thousand mark is in sight...

 

[Chiny91]

The addon rotate-logs.add with the 'none' parameter only takes a second or so to run.
It looks for an existing marker. When found, it counts the relevant requests from it, deletes the old marker and sets a new one at the end of the dnsmasq.log file and sends the SIGUSR.
If no marker is found in that file, the counting is done and a marker is written to it, sending a SIGUSR.

OK, 1 second is fine, quite acceptable for my requirements. I've got side-tracked for the moment re the 1-script-only, by what else the routers stats (rs) produces, briefly mentioned earlier.

It turns out that rs is most revealing in showing oddball happenings on my network. I blacklisted the cam manufacturer site when rs showed the cams "phoning home", then failing owing to an outdated config (also fixed). Some of my wireless devices are not behaving entirely properly and each of them needs a twiddle. Obviously none of this is the purpose of AB-Solution but is nevertheless most useful.

Calling rotate-logs.add none resets the New ads counter; is there any way to reset the Weekly ads ? It would be useful in checking the impact of my various device configs.

Incidentally I'm most impressed with all that bash, or is it ash, scripting. I occasionally write small bash scripts myself but as soon as anything bigger is required, I call on Python.

 

[thelonelycoder]

OK, 1 second is fine, quite acceptable for my requirements. I've got side-tracked for the moment re the 1-script-only, by what else the routers stats (rs) produces, briefly mentioned earlier.

It turns out that rs is most revealing in showing oddball happenings on my network. I blacklisted the cam manufacturer site when rs showed the cams "phoning home", then failing owing to an outdated config (also fixed). Some of my wireless devices are not behaving entirely properly and each of them needs a twiddle. Obviously none of this is the purpose of AB-Solution but is nevertheless most useful.

Calling rotate-logs.add none resets the New ads counter; is there any way to reset the Weekly ads ? It would be useful in checking the impact of my various device configs.

Incidentally I'm most impressed with all that bash, or is it ash, scripting. I occasionally write small bash scripts myself but as soon as anything bigger is required, I call on Python.

Ash, Almquist exactly, via BusyBox. Remarkable what you can achieve, thanks to @john9527 and @RMerlin being ao kind as to use the same settings for BB.

The weekly ads counter counts since last update day, without modifying the addon file this is not possible.
And I don't recommend it, AB is very protective and aware of it's envronment and redownlads the file for reasons only the coder knows...

 

[Chiny91]

The weekly ads counter counts since last update day, without modifying the addon file this is not possible.
And I don't recommend it, AB is very protective and aware of it's envronment and redownlads the file for reasons only the coder knows...

Ha yes, I understand your reluctance; I'd do the same. But I like breaking things

Let me see, there must be a way:
logging off/on... no effect
ad-blocking off/on... no effect
tenacious set of stats
blocking file date/time change... not immediate but should work overnight.

I'm tempted to copy across the relevant log file to the Mac and process it for one or two things, just for interest. At least if I break something, only a copy file will get trashed.

 

[thelonelycoder]

Ha yes, I understand your reluctance; I'd do the same. But I like breaking things

Let me see, there must be a way:
logging off/on... no effect
ad-blocking off/on... no effect
tenacious set of stats
blocking file date/time change... not immediate but should work overnight.

I'm tempted to copy across the relevant log file to the Mac and process it for one or two things, just for interest. At least if I break something, only a copy file will get trashed.

It's your router. I have built AB with self fixing capabilities for a good reason.
Hint: Don't ask me how to fix it if you break things in AB.

I already spent a lot of time coding it for you all so that it works as well as it does.
Helping fix things that are deliberately broken is not high on my favourites list.
Warnings are given in every file...

 

[Jack Yaz]

It's your router. I have built AB with self fixing capabilities for a good reason.
Hint: Don't ask me how to fix it if you break things in AB.

I already spent a lot of time coding it for you all so that it works as well as it does.
Helping fix things that are deliberately broken is not high on my favourites list.
Warnings are given in every file...

Is the site down?

 

[thelonelycoder]

Is the site down?

I'm on it, thanks. Whole server is down.

 

[Jack Yaz]

I'm on it, thanks. Whole server is down.

Ok no worries, I've been playing with so many firewall scripts I didn't know if it was a "what have I broke now" kind of deal

 

[thelonelycoder]

Ok no worries, I've been playing with so many firewall scripts I didn't know if it was a "what have I broke now" kind of deal

Up again.
Have to check the logs for reason.

 

[thelonelycoder]

Is the site down?

I have decided to move the ab-solution.info domain to another server as soon as time permits.
I'll let you all know when that happens, uptime should then be at the expected 99.9% mark.

 

[Chiny91]

It's your router. I have built AB with self fixing capabilities for a good reason.
Hint: Don't ask me how to fix it if you break things in AB.

It wouldn't even occur to me to ask perish the thought. I've decided against parsing the copied to elsewhere file as I get everything I need from AB itself; those router stats are most useful.

I've had 2 -Merlin (+ 1 AB) installations running for a couple of weeks now. It is probably time to sit back and watch, hoping all is reliable and it is looking good so far.

 

[thelonelycoder]

It wouldn't even occur to me to ask perish the thought. I've decided against parsing the copied to elsewhere file as I get everything I need from AB itself; those router stats are most useful.

I've had 2 -Merlin (+ 1 AB) installations running for a couple of weeks now. It is probably time to sit back and watch, hoping all is reliable and it is looking good so far.

I always try to help, but if the user still does things without understanding it and refusing further explanations I'll politely stop helping.
I do have an open ear for ideas and improvements tough.

 

[Ubimo]

Hello
Long time user here, I just found theses errors in log:

May 20 09:51:28 dnsmasq[885]: bad name at /tmp/mnt/USB/adblocking/blocking_file line 196907
May 20 09:51:31 dnsmasq[885]: bad name at /tmp/mnt/USB/adblocking/blocking_file line 379585
May 20 09:51:33 dnsmasq[885]: bad name at /tmp/mnt/USB/adblocking/blocking_file line 580967

What do I do?

 

[thelonelycoder]

Hello
Long time user here, I just found theses errors in log:

May 20 09:51:28 dnsmasq[885]: bad name at /tmp/mnt/USB/adblocking/blocking_file line 196907
May 20 09:51:31 dnsmasq[885]: bad name at /tmp/mnt/USB/adblocking/blocking_file line 379585
May 20 09:51:33 dnsmasq[885]: bad name at /tmp/mnt/USB/adblocking/blocking_file line 580967

What do I do?

Nothing, it's a domain name with a character that dnsmasq does not support.
Ignore the log entry, just as dnsmasq ignores the lines containing it.
Everything else works just fine.

 

[bayern1975]

Hello
Long time user here, I just found theses errors in log:

May 20 09:51:28 dnsmasq[885]: bad name at /tmp/mnt/USB/adblocking/blocking_file line 196907
May 20 09:51:31 dnsmasq[885]: bad name at /tmp/mnt/USB/adblocking/blocking_file line 379585
May 20 09:51:33 dnsmasq[885]: bad name at /tmp/mnt/USB/adblocking/blocking_file line 580967

What do I do?

or find that domains and manual remove character....i do that and no more bad name in log.....

 

[MarCoMLXXV]

@thelonelycoder : first of all, thanks for your efforts, AB-solution is a joy to use, no more waiting until browser extensions respond, and it works flawlessly.

I noticed the following lies after updating AB-solutionj:

 getting hosts file 3, preprocessing file...
 http://support.it-mate.co.uk/downloads/hosts.txt

 file 3 download failed or file is not hosts file, using backup file

I checked whether the server is down, using www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://support.it-mate.co.uk/ and it appears to be down indeed, so the current hosts.txt provided by http://support.it-mate.co.uk/ can't be dowloaded. What backup file is AB-solution reverting to in case a download fails? The latest succesful downloaded hosts.txt for that specific host? Or is it something else?

 

[thelonelycoder]

@thelonelycoder : first of all, thanks for your efforts, AB-solution is a joy to use, no more waiting until browser extensions respond, and it works flawlessly.

I noticed the following lies after updating AB-solutionj:

 getting hosts file 3, preprocessing file...
 http://support.it-mate.co.uk/downloads/hosts.txt

 file 3 download failed or file is not hosts file, using backup file

I checked whether the server is down, using www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://support.it-mate.co.uk/ and it appears to be down indeed, so the current hosts.txt provided by http://support.it-mate.co.uk/ can't be dowloaded. What backup file is AB-solution reverting to in case a download fails? The latest succesful downloaded hosts.txt for that specific host? Or is it something else?

That depends, but normally is the last weeks file.

While downloading, AB numbers the hosts files in order of appearance in the config file or the custom_hosts_list.txt, when the blocking file is set to Custom.
When a hosts file is successfully downloaded, a number of checks are done to determine if it is indeed a properly formatted hosts file. If OK, it then is copied over to /adblocking/backup/hosts_file<file number>.bak, overwriting an existing file.
This is done every time the update-hosts.add runs.
These active backup files are therefore no older than one week if all goes well.

If if fails to download as in your case, or found not to be a proper hosts file, it uses that numbered backup instead to amalgamate the blocking_file.

However, if you change the blocking file type, the number count changes and with it the hosts file it represents.
If at this time the download fails, the backup file used may be a different hosts file.
This is corrected the next time the hosts file is successfully downloaded.
This is a calculated 'risk' I deemed not too serious in that particular case. It also made the coding much simpler for that function.

Note that there may be older passive *.bak files from a blocking file type that uses a greater number of hosts files then your currently set blocking file type.

 

[thelonelycoder]

or find that domains and manual remove character....i do that and no more bad name in log.....

That's really not necessary and nothing to worry about, dnsmasq simply ignores these lines and jumps to the next line to read in.
And as long as there are foreign characters in certain hosts files, this remains the case as the blocking_file is renewed once every week on update day.

Removing the offending character from a domain name may have a detrimental effect:
appl<illigal char>e.com
after removing:
apple.com

Hmmm.