IF YOU MAKE ANY CHANGES TO THIS FILE YOU HAVE TO RESTART THE ACRYLIC DNS PROXY SERVICE OR CONSOLE IN ORDER TO SEE

THEIR EFFECTS.

This is the AcrylicHosts.txt file.

It contains predefined mappings between domain names and addresses the same way the native Windows HOSTS file does but

with a few upgrades.

The standard format is: IPADDRESS DOMAINNAME1 [DOMAINNAME2] [DOMAINNAME3] ...

Where IPADDRESS is in dotted-quad notation for IPv4 or in colon-separated groups for IPv6 and DOMAINNAME1, DOMAINNAME2

and DOMAINNAME3 are strings.

A line starting with the '#' character (and everything after it if it's found within a line) is considered a comment

and therefore ignored.

Domain names can contain wildcard characters '*' (matches zero or more characters) and '?' (matches exactly one

character):

127.0.0.1 ad.* ads.*

Domain names can also be regular expressions if starting with a '/' character:

127.0.0.1 /^ads?..*$

Note that there's no final '/' at the end of a regular expression. More info about the regular expression engine and

its syntax can be found at:

http://www.pcre.org/

A '>' character at the beginning of a domain name is a convenient shortcut for representing all domain names ending

with what follows after that character. For example an entry like this one:

127.0.0.1 >google.com

Is equivalent to:

127.0.0.1 google.com *.google.com

NXDOMAIN (or negative) responses and FORWARD entries can also be mapped to domain names using all of the possibilities

(i.e. wildcard characters & regular expressions) already explained above:

NX www.google.com

NX >google.com

NX /^ads?..*$

FORWARD entries in particular are always evaluated first and can be used to specify exceptions to the other rules. For

example a configuration like this:

FW >apple.com

FW >google.com

FW >microsoft.com

NX *

Instructs Acrylic to forward to your DNS servers requests for domain names ending with "apple.com", "google.com" and

"microsoft.com" and to return a NXDOMAIN response for all the other ones, thus effectively blocking every domain

except the ones you explicitly allow.

For easier maintenance of entries coming from multiple sources it is also possible to "include" external HOSTS files

using the following syntax (the line must start with a '@' character followed by a space and then by a relative or an

absolute file name):

@ AcrylicHostsGroup1.txt

@ AcrylicHostsGroup2.txt

Using a large number of patterns or regular expressions may cause Acrylic to slow down significantly. From a purely

performance perspective it is better to use a large list of domain names rather than a lot of patterns and regexes.

Patterns and regexes should be used to ease manual maintenance when the full list of domain names is either unknown or

too variable. A domain name is free, a pattern is relatively cheap and a regular expression is rather expensive.

127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain

::1 localhost localhost.localdomain