 |
Referral Link: http://www.senserely.com/referral/7777778a
Well, and in today’s “blog-entry” I will describe the Pyrenean’s DNSKong program: http://www.pyrenean.com/?page_value=-1 in great detail; it is available as a .zip archive or as an installer, while the most current version of DNSKong is 1.43, released on January 2, 2005 (however, the author e-mailed me a not-yet-released 1.44 version with a new “Socktime=” option added into its “DNSKong.ini” file), and it runs on Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, and XP …
To start with it, DNSKong is a free, “non-setup” and small in lenght (only 280 KB) personal caching, filtering and blocking so-called psuedo-DNS server application for Windows, and I use it now for more than half a year. Its concept is quite similar to hosts-file blocking principle with many advantages. For a bit more detailed description, see this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNSKong where I wrote about DNSKong on Wikipedia (my nick is “Wayfarer”)
Anyway, the main program’s principle is pretty straight-forward, i.e. there are two basic configuration files “named.txt” and “pass.txt”. The first one contains all the host-names that you don’t want any contact with them, while the second one contains entries that would be otherwise blocked, but you exclude them from blocking. There are many pre-set filters available to download in a packed “taygas.zip” file; the link is somewhere on the DNSKong’s home-site, however, I also posted it below at the bottom of the article/review. DNSKong also supports filtering by the string only (filtering by only part of a full host-name), and further, it supports also the so-called “Proxy DNS feature”, meaning that you can choose up to five preferred DNS servers (your ISP’s Name Server IPs), and DNSKong will send each proxied IP your domain requests and use the first successful response. Finally, there is also another file called presets.txt (a cache of IPs and host-names), which contains the resolved IPs for the respective host-names to fasten the performance. DNSKong uses an internal memory structure for the cache and filters (a list of domain names along with the IP), and the presets are also stored in the same list. The cache is cleared each time you stop and start DNSKong.
/IMPORTANT: Also note there are two “modes” or “ways of usage” that are most commonly used. One mode is to block-all the DNS traffic with adding .com, .net, .org etc. into the named.txt file, except for those few sites that you visit on day-to-day basis, and you’ve added them to the pass.txt file, while another mode is to pass-all, except for those malicious strings or full host-names that you’ve added to the named.txt file. This first “block-all mode” might be exactly what you need, and also you can set DNSKong to “Hide” or “Hide on Start” so that the program is almost invisible.
P.S. - Here are also few other related links; as first a link to Pyrenean main-site/front-page: http://www.pyrenean.com (btw. check also the eDexter program from the same site/author), then a link to DNSKong tutorial hosted at Accs-net: http://accs-net.com/hosts/DNSKong.html, next is Bruce’s tutorial at Pacificnet site: http://www.pacificnet.net/~bbruce, and finally a link to “taygas.zip” file mentioned in one of the paragraphs above: http://www.pyrenean.com/tayga.php
Ivan Tadej (user: “tayiper”)
Referral Link: http://www.senserely.com/referral/7777778a
