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How to use Adblock Plus filter subscriptions to provide advertisement filtering to devices

Eric Sauvageau edited this page Feb 23, 2020 · 11 revisions

Introduction

Links in the Installation portion are obsolete. Before the guide can be followed they must be updated! This guide will help you setup advertisement filtering (similar to Adblock Plus) through your router. It is suggested to use in conjunction with a mobile device (such as an iOS or Android smartphone), as filtering a PC will cause performance loss due to hardware limitations on the router. This guide uses privoxy (a proxy server) to capture and filter traffic from mobile devices.

Prerequisites

To setup advertisement filtering on your router, you will need a working Entware environment. Instructions to setup Entware can be found in this guide.

Installation

First, install the necessary packages:

opkg install bash wget sed privoxy

Next, download and install the already prepared privoxy configuration file:

cd /opt/etc/privoxy/
rm ./config
wget http://files.ryzhov-al.ru/Routers/adblock-plus/config              Obsolete link, please update it!

Next, download and install the script that will convert Adblock Plus rules for use with our proxy:

wget http://files.ryzhov-al.ru/Routers/adblock-plus/privoxy-blocklist_0.2.sh         Obsolete link, please update it!

Mark the script as executable so we can run it:

chmod +x ./privoxy-blocklist_0.2.sh

Edit the script to include the Adblock Plus subscriptions that you would like to use. A list of subscriptions can be found on this page. You may also consult the Adblock Plus installation in your preferred browser for the subscriptions it uses. Find the URLS= line in the script and append the URLs of the subscriptions to it.

Next, download the subscription's filters and create the privoxy blacklist by running the script:

./privoxy-blocklist_0.2.sh

Determine the device you would like to apply advertisement filtering to. You will need to apply a static IP for this device - you can do so by accessing your router's web interface (the default address is 192.168.1.1) in a web browser, then clicking LAN in the navigation sidebar (under Advanced Settings), then clicking the DHCP Server tab. Enable the Enable Manual Assignment radio option, and select or input the MAC address of the device in the Manually Assigned IP around the DHCP list dropdown box. If the device you wish to filter does not appear in the dropdown box, make sure that it is connected to the router via a wired or wireless connection and refresh the page. Assign the MAC address a static IP address within the router's IP address range (for example, 192.168.1.25). Be sure to click the Apply button to apply your changes.

If you have already set up manually assigned IP addresses via DHCP you can find them in one of the following files:

cat /etc/hosts.dnsmasq
cat /var/lib/misc/dnsmasq.leases

Next, add a rule to iptables to intercept traffic from the device and pass it through privoxy for advertisement filtering:

echo "#!/bin/sh" > /jffs/scripts/firewall-start
echo "iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING --source [the static IP address you provided] -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 3128" >> /jffs/scripts/firewall-start
chmod +x /jffs/scripts/firewall-start

(Ensure you replace [the static IP address you provided] with the static IP address you assigned in the previous step.)

Reboot the router, and check the device to ensure that advertisement filtering is working as expected!

Changing or Updating the Subscriptions

If you'd like to change the subscriptions (for example, to add a new subscription list) or update the existing subscriptions, you'll need to remove the old ones first:

./privoxy-blocklist_0.2.sh -r

If you're changing the subscription lists, edit the script as described in the instructions above to add/remove the subscription URLs as necessary. If you just wish to update the lists, no script editing is necessary. Then run the script to download the updated subscription filters and create a new privoxy blacklist:

./privoxy-blocklist_0.2.sh

Conclusion

At this point, you should have a working proxy server that filters advertisements from webpages loaded on a provided device. For discussion and assistance if this guide is not working for you, please refer to the thread this guide came from on the SmallNetBuilder forums.

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