Adbyss
Adbyss is a DNS blocklist manager for x86-64 Linux machines.
While ad-blocking browser extensions are extremely useful, they only block unwatned content in the browser, and require read/write access to every page you visit, which adds overhead and potential security/privacy issues.
Adbyss instead writes "blackhole" records directly to your system's /etc/hosts file, preventing all spammy connection attempts system-wide. As this is just a text file, no special runtime scripts are required, and there is very little overhead.
Installation
Debian and Ubuntu users can just grab the pre-built .deb package from the latest release.
This application is written in Rust and can alternatively be built from source using Cargo:
# Clone the source.
git clone https://github.com/Blobfolio/adbyss.git
# Go to it.
cd adbyss
# Copy the configuration file.
sudo cp adbyss/misc/adbyss.yaml /etc
# Build as usual. Specify additional flags as desired.
cargo build \
--bin adbyss \
--release
(This should work under other 64-bit Unix environments too, like MacOS.)
Usage
It's easy.
Settings are stored in /etc/adbyss.yaml. Edit those as needed.
Otherwise, just run sudo adbyss [FLAGS] [OPTIONS].
The following flags are available:
| Short | Long | Description |
|---|---|---|
--disable | Remove all Adbyss entries from the hostfile. | |
-h | --help | Print help information and exit. |
-q | --quiet | Do not summarize changes after write. |
--show | Print a sorted blackholable hosts list to STDOUT, one per line. | |
--stdout | Print the would-be hostfile to STDOUT instead of writing it to disk. | |
-V | --version | Print program version and exit. |
-y | --yes | Non-interactive mode; answer "yes" to all prompts. |
And the following option is available:
| Short | Long | Value | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
-c | --config | <PATH> | Use this configuration instead of /etc/adbyss.yaml. |
After running Adbyss for the first time, you might find some web sites are no longer working as expected. Most likely you're blocking an evil dependency the web site thinks it needs. No worries, just open your browser's Network Dev Tool window and reload the page. Make note of any failing domain(s), and update the /etc/adbyss.yaml configuration accordingly.
Restart your browser and/or computer and everything should be peachy again.
If ads persist in displaying even after running Adbyss and rebooting, double-check the browser isn't bypassing your computer's local DNS records. (Firefox's DNS-Over-HTTPS feature sometimes does this.) Tweak your settings as needed and you should be back in business.
It is important to remember that scammers and capitalists birth new schemes all the time. It is a good idea to rerun Adbyss weekly or so to ensure your hosts list contains the latest updates.
Automation
The repository contains two systemd scripts — a timer and a service — that can be used to automatically update your /etc/hosts file once daily using the global settings (stored in /etc/adbyss.yaml).
If you installed Adbyss using the pre-built .deb package, all you need to do is enable and start the timer, then you can forget all about it!
sudo systemctl enable adbyss.timer
sudo systemctl start adbyss.timer
If you built Adbyss manually, you'll need to manually copy both scripts to the appropriate /etc/systemd or /lib/systemd subfolder and run:
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable adbyss.timer
sudo systemctl start adbyss.timer
Removal
If you're using the systemd service, be sure to stop and disable those scripts before doing anything else:
sudo systemctl stop adbyss.timer
sudo systemctl disable adbyss.timer
Then to remove all blocked entries, you can either open the hostfile in an editor and remove the # ADBYSS # marker and all subsequent lines, or run:
adbyss --disable
Save, reboot, and you should be back to normal!