I wrote a new article about how you can add protection to malware hosts on your home server. It uses lists published by the Malware Domain Blocklist site. A script will keep your system updated. Currently this list contains a little bit more then 20000 malware sites.
Tag: DNS
Protection against spying TV’s with the homeserver project.
An interesting thread can be read at DoctorBeet’s Blog about LG smart TV’s sending private information to several Internet sites. In the article about the basic network setup I did create a hook in the setup of dnsmasq, the name server for your internal network. The setup has the following line:
conf-dir=/etc/dnsmasq.d
This means that any file dropped in that directory is read when dnsmasq starts. To block the sites mentioned at DoctorBeet’s Blog, create the file /etc/dnsmasq.d/80-lg-block with the following contents:
# # LG smart TV spy networks # address=/ad.lgappstv.com/127.0.0.1 address=/yumenetworks.com/127.0.0.1 address=/smartclip.net/127.0.0.1 address=/smartclip.com/127.0.0.1 address=/smartshare.lgtvsdp.com/127.0.0.1 address=/ibis.lgappstv.com/127.0.0.1
The restart dnsmasq using /etc/rc.d/rc.dnsmasq restart. If you use the IP address of your home server instead of 127.0.0.1 you can see all these requests in the log of your own internal web server. But if you use 127.0.0.1 you won’t see a thing, the TV will be talking to itself.
This option is also useful to block sites you don’t want to contact such as these irritating popup (poker/sex) sites.
Samba 4 is out.
On 11 December Samba 4.0.0 was released. This new Samba version can act as a Active Directory domain controller. I decided too look at it and see if it would be useful for the Home Server articles on this server.