To relieve myself of the massive onslaught that is web advertising, I've started a local DNS server for myself that is updated regularly with domain names that are known to serve banner ads. By listing them in my local DNS server, it won't go out to the internet to find the real ip for the site, and will just give an error message where the ad would normally be. Sometimes it's whole domains such as doubleclick.com, or individual hostnames such as rmads.msn.com, where disabling a whole domain would block resources that you probably want to be able see. There are programs out there that build large local HOSTS files on each machine, however they don't work as well as a centralized DNS server. For one, you'd have to update each machine whenever there was an addition, and secondly, Win2k and WinXP machines start to bog down in web browsing when the HOSTS file gets too large. Many problems I had were instantly alleviated when I moved it to the DNS server.

I've inserted the ip of my local web server's error page into a large amount of the entries so it shows something a little more appealing to the eye, namely:

Below is a Windows registry file that can simply be double-clicked on to import into your already configured Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server DNS server. In addition to this, you'll need to download and unzip the dnsfiles.zip into your \windows_directory\system32\dns. These files are referenced by the registry entries. You can also hit www.igmus.org/code/jeremiahcode to get the converter that he's created to convert the reg file to djbdns for unix. Enjoy.

Windows 2k DNS Zone Dump Registry file - adblocker.reg

DNS zone files - dnsfiles.zip

Email: adblocker@machineroom.org