[Dnsmasq-discuss] Best practice for using Dnsmasq to block advertisements

[Neil Darlow]

Hi,

I've been using Dnsmasq successfully to manage DNS and DHCP for my home
services for a while now and I thank you for this excellent piece of
software.

I'm now seeking to implement an Ad-blocking solution using Dnsmasq and
have seen various methods available:
1) The address= format
2) The server= format
3) The conventional /etc/hosts format

In exploring these methods I find that (1) is quite inefficient, (2)
seems to prevent Dnsmasq starting under Systemd with a large number of
entries and (3) seems viable except for one issue.

The /etc/hosts format seems to complain about Punycode/IDN formatted
hostnames to the extent that a large number of them floods the systemd
journal. I get the impression that resolution does work for those
entries though.

What are people's thoughts on using Dnsmasq in this role and can these
"bad name" errors for internationalized hostnames in addn-hosts= be
mitigated/eliminated somehow?

For reference, I am using dnsmasq-2.86 on archlinuxARM and it is built
with libidn2 support.

TIA,
Neil Darlow