Re: Suppressing "Document Contains No Data" Errors

[John Summerfield <debian@ComputerDatasafe.com.au>]

Scarletdown wrote:

> Quite some time ago, I made a whole bunch of entries in my hosts file 
> to effectively block ad servers and other undesirable stuff, using the 
> instructions found here:
>
> http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
>
> This has worked quite well, except I frequently get "Document Contains 
> No Data" messages when one of the URLs in the hosts file comes up.  As 
> an example, when I go to the eBay main page, I get that error like 8 
> or 9 times in a row, due to these two entries in /etc/hosts...
>
> 127.0.0.1 altfarm.mediaplex.com
> 127.0.0.1 ebay.doubleclick.net
>
> What would be an easy way to suppress these error messages?  I'm 
> guessing that perhaps routing them to /dev/null might do it, but I 
> can't remember if I should use | or > and whichever one gets used.  Or 
> am I way off base here in thinking that this will suppress the errors?


A couple of ideas come to mind:
1. Install and use Squid and Squidguard. Squid caches stuff for you, and 
the cache is shared twixt users and browsers. Squidguard uses blacklists 
to block sites and returns other (configurable) stuff instead of 
undesirable content.
2. Set up a webserver whose default vhost serves up empty but valid 
documents for all requests.

The first will do the better job coz you can get a head start with a 
pretty decent set of blacklists. See www.SquidGuard.org



--

Cheers
John

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