Interviewed by CNN on 25/08/2011 23:03, sean nathan bean told the world: > so what's the point of hosts.deny ? or do we need both?
I'm not much of a Linux user, but let me take a stab at it... The purpose of the "hosts" file is to assign a permanent mapping between host names (that is, computers, servers etc.) and IP address. It's a very old technique, dating to the stone age of networking, and has been mostly replaced by DNS servers. Except when you need a workaround for some situation where the mapping you need is not available on DNS or the DNS keeps giving you the wrong info... Nowadays, the most common uses of "hosts" are: 1. Malware hijacking known sites -- like redirecting google.com to their own servers. 2. Redirecting undesirable sites to an invalid IP address, such as 127.0.0.1 (localhost) or 0.0.0.0. This is a basic form of site blocking. The thing is, look at that big hosts file someone linked to; importing it to your "hosts" file makes it very hard to maintain -- I mean, if you have 20000 lines blocking undesirable sites, are you going to notice a couple lines in the middle redirecting the site of your bank to a password thief? So, I suppose that some bright Linux hacker had the idea of having an auxiliary hosts.deny file which only purpose is to block; sites listed there as blocked, not redirected. That way, your "hosts" file stays in a manageable size. As a bonus, I suppose the hosts.deny can be smaller, since it doesn't have to list the bogus IP addresses for all the sites. -- MCBastos This message has been protected with the 2ROT13 algorithm. Unauthorized use will be prosecuted under the DMCA. -=-=- ... Sent from my Atari ST. *Added by TagZilla 0.066.2 running on Seamonkey 2.3.1 * Get it at http://xsidebar.mozdev.org/modifiedmailnews.html#tagzilla _______________________________________________ support-seamonkey mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
