A simple DNSMASQ/Unbound-based AdBlocking service for OpenWrt/LEDE Project.
/etc/init.d/simple-adblock
file.dl
command if you want to force re-download of the list).dnsmasq.ipset
option.If you want a more robust AdBlocking, supporting free memory detection and complex block lists, supporting IDN, check out net/adblock.
Service Status
Configuration - Basic Configuration
Configuration - Advanced Configuration
Whitelist and Blocklist Management
This service requires the following packages to be installed on your router: dnsmasq
or dnsmasq-full
or unbound
and either ca-certificates
, wget
and libopenssl
(for OpenWrt 15.05.1) or uclient-fetch
and libustream-mbedtls
(for LEDE Project and OpenWrt 18.06.xx or newer). Additionally installation of coreutils-sort
is highly recommended as it speeds up blocklist processing.
To satisfy the requirements for connect to your router via ssh and run the following commands:
The dnsmasq.ipset
option requires you to install ipset
and dnsmasq-full
instead of the dnsmasq
. To do that, connect to your router via ssh and run the following command:
opkg update; opkg remove dnsmasq; opkg install dnsmasq-full ipset;
opkg update; opkg install ca-certificates wget libopenssl coreutils-sort dnsmasq
opkg update; opkg install uclient-fetch libustream-mbedtls coreutils-sort dnsmasq
For IPv6 support additionally install ip6tables-mod-nat
and kmod-ipt-nat6
packages from Web UI or run the following in the command line:
opkg update; opkg install ip6tables-mod-nat kmod-ipt-nat6
The coreutils-sort
is an optional, but recommended package as it speeds up sorting and removing duplicates from the merged list dramatically. If opkg complains that it can't install coreutils-sort
because /usr/bin/sort is already provided by busybox, you can run opkg --force-overwrite install coreutils-sort
.
If you are running a development (trunk/snapshot) build of OpenWrt/LEDE Project on your router and your build is outdated (meaning that packages of the same revision/commit hash are no longer available and when you try to satisfy the requirements you get errors), please flash either current LEDE release image or current development/snapshot image.
Install simple-adblock
and luci-app-simple-adblock
packages from Web UI or run the following in the command line:
opkg update; opkg install simple-adblock luci-app-simple-adblock
If simple-adblock
and luci-app-simple-adblock
packages are not found in the official feed/repo for your version of OpenWrt/LEDE Project, you will need to add a custom repo to your router first.
Default configuration has service disabled (use Web UI to enable/start service or run uci set simple-adblock.config.enabled=1; uci commit simple-adblock;
) and selected ad/malware lists suitable for routers with 64Mb RAM. The configuration file has lists in descending order starting with biggest ones, comment out or delete the lists you don't want or your router can't handle.
You can use Web UI (found in Services/Simple AdBlock) to add/remove/edit links to:
simple-adblock
on multiple routers and maintain one centralized whitelist which you can publish on a web-server.Please note that these lists must include either http://
or https://
(or, if curl
is installed the file://
) prefix. Some of the top block lists (both hosts files and domains lists) suitable for routers with at least 8MB RAM are used in the default simple-adblock
installation.
You can also use Web UI to add individual domains to be blocked or whitelisted.
If you want to use CLI to customize simple-adblock
config, refer to the Customization Settings section.
Once the service is enabled in the config file, run /etc/init.d/simple-adblock start
to start the service. Either /etc/init.d/simple-adblock restart
or /etc/init.d/simple-adblock reload
will only restart the service and/or re-donwload the lists if there were relevant changes in the config file since the last successful start. Had the previous start resulted in any error, either /etc/init.d/simple-adblock start
, /etc/init.d/simple-adblock restart
or /etc/init.d/simple-adblock reload
will attempt to re-download the lists.
If you want to force simple-adblock to re-download the lists, run /etc/init.d/simple-adblock dl
.
If you want to check if the specific domain (or part of the domain name) is being blocked, run /etc/init.d/simple-adblock check test-domain.com
.
In the Web UI the simple-adblock
settings are split into basic
and advanced
settings. The full list of configuration parameters of simple-adblock.config
section is:
Web UI Section | Parameter | Type | Default | Description |
---|---|---|---|---|
Basic | enabled | boolean | 0 | Enable/disable the simple-adblock service. |
Basic | verbosity | integer | 2 | Can be set to 0, 1 or 2 to control the console and system log output verbosity of the simple-adblock service. |
Basic | force_dns | boolean | 1 | Force router's DNS to local devices which may have different/hardcoded DNS server settings. If enabled, creates a firewall rule to intercept DNS requests from local devices to external DNS servers and redirect them to router. |
Basic | led | string | none | Use one of the router LEDs to indicate the AdBlocking status. |
Advanced | dns | string | dnsmasq.servers | DNS resolution option. See table below for addtional information. |
Advanced | ipv6_enabled | boolean | 0 | Add IPv6 entries to block-list if dnsmasq.addnhosts is used. This option is only visible in Web UI if the dnsmasq.addnhosts is selected as the DNS resolution option. |
Advanced | boot_delay | integer | 120 | Delay service activation for that many seconds on boot up. You can shorten it to 10-30 seconds on modern fast routers. Routers with built-in modems may require longer boot delay. |
Advanced | download_timeout | integer | 10 | Time-out downloads if no reply received within that many last seconds. |
Advanced | curl_retry | integer | 3 | If curl is installed and detected, attempt that many retries for failed downloads. |
Advanced | parallel_downloads | boolean | 1 | If enabled, all downloads are completed concurrently, if disabled -- sequentioally. Concurrent downloads dramatically speed up service loading. |
Advanced | debug | boolean | 0 | If enabled, output service full debug to /tmp/simple-adblock.log . Please note that the debug file may clog up the router's RAM on some devices. Use with caution. |
Advanced | allow_non_ascii | boolean | 0 | Enable support for non-ASCII characters in the final AdBlocking file. Only enable if your target service supports non-ASCII characters. If you enable this on the system where DNS resolver doesn't support non-ASCII characters, it will crash. Use with caution. |
Advanced | compressed_cache | boolean | 0 | Create compressed cache of the AdBlocking file in router's persistent memory. Only recommended to be used on routers with large ROM and/or routers with metered/flaky internet connection. |
whitelist_domain | list/string | List of white-listed domains. | ||
whitelist_domains_url | list/string | List of URL(s) to text files containing white-listed domains. Must include either http:// or https:// (or, if curl is installed the file:// ) prefix. Useful if you want to keep/publish a single white-list for multiple routers. |
||
blacklist_domains_url | list/string | List of URL(s) to text files containing black-listed domains. Must include either http:// or https:// (or, if curl is installed the file:// ) prefix. |
||
blacklist_hosts_url | list/string | List of URL(s) to hosts files containing black-listed domains. Must include either http:// or https:// (or, if curl is installed the file:// ) prefix. |
Currently supported options are:
Option | Explanation |
---|---|
dnsmasq.addnhosts |
Creates the DNSMASQ additional hosts file /var/run/simple-adblock.addnhosts and modifies DNSMASQ settings, so that DNSMASQ resolves all blocked domains to "local machine": 127.0.0.1. This option doesn't allow block-list optimization (by removing secondary level domains if the top-level domain is also in the block-list), so it results in a much larger block-list file, but, unlike other DNSMASQ-based options, it has almost no effect on the DNS look up speed. This option also allows quick reloads of DNSMASQ on block-list updates. |
dnsmasq.conf |
Creates the DNSMASQ config file /var/dnsmasq.d/simple-adblock so that DNSMASQ replies with NXDOMAIN: "domain not found". This option allows the block-list optimization (by removing secondary level domains if the top-level domain is also in the block-list), resulting in the smaller block-list file. This option will slow down DNS look up speed somewhat. |
dnsmasq.ipset |
Creates the DNSMASQ ipset file /var/dnsmasq.d/simple-adblock.ipset and the firewall rule to reject the matching requests. This is the only option for AdBlocking if you're using a browser with DNS-over-HTTPS proxy built-in, like Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome/Chromium. This option allows the block-list optimization (by removing secondary level domains if the top-level domain is also in the block-list), resulting in the smaller block-list file. This option requires you install dnsmasq-full and ipset as described here.PLEASE NOTE, that unlike other options which are truly domain name based blocking, this is essentially an IP address based blocking, ie: if you try to block google-analytics.com with this option, it may also block/break things like YouTube, Hangouts and other Google services if they share IP address(es) with google-analytics.com . |
dnsmasq.servers |
Creates the DNSMASQ servers file /var/run/simple-adblock.servers and modifies DNSMASQ settings so that DNSMASQ replies with NXDOMAIN: "domain not found". This option allows the block-list optimization (by removing secondary level domains if the top-level domain is also in the block-list), resulting in the smaller block-list file. This option will slow down DNS look up speed somewhat. This is a default setting as it results in the smaller block-file and allows quick reloads of DNSMASQ. |
unbound.adb_list |
Creates the Unbound config file /var/lib/unbound/adb_list.simple-adblock so that Unbound replies with NXDOMAIN: "domain not found". This option allows the block-list optimization (by removing secondary level domains if the top-level domain is also in the block-list), resulting in the smaller block-list file. |
This service downloads (and processes in the background, removing comments and other useless data) lists of hosts and domains to be blocked, combines those lists into one big block list, removes duplicates and sorts it and then removes your whitelisted domains from the block list before converting to to DNSMASQ/Unbound-compatible file and restarting DNSMASQ/Unbound if needed. The result of the process is that DNSMASQ/Unbound return NXDOMAIN or 127.0.0.1 (depending on settings) for the blocked domains.
If you specify google.com
as a domain to be whitelisted, you will have access to google.com
, www.google.com
, analytics.google.com
, but not fake domains like email-google.com
or drive.google.com.verify.signin.normandeassociation.com
for example. If you only want to allow www.google.com
while blocking all other google.com
subdomains, just specify www.google.com
as domain to be whitelisted.
In general, whatever domain is specified to be whitelisted; it, along with with its subdomains will be whitelisted, but not any fake domains containing it.
Please head to OpenWrt Forum for discussion of this package.
I'd like to thank everyone who helped create, test and troubleshoot this service. Special thanks to @hnyman for general package/luci guidance, @dibdot for general guidance and block-list optimization code, @ckuethe for the curl support, non-ASCII filtering and compressed cache code, @EricLuehrsen for the Unbound support information, @mushoz for performance testing and @phasecat for submitting various bugs and testing.