I’m ok with the ad-supported business model, but when on the screen I find 10 (ten!) advertising for the same computer vendor I feel a strong urge to get some ad-freedom.
Often times the ads are not static, but dynamic and this obsoletes older computer faster than strictly needed. This motivates me even further.
A few years back I have successfully used a nice little tool to convert my DS411Slim into an ad-blocker.
The process was simple and all was good until my DS411Slim died for good.
After recovering all the data (with a fair amount of stress and work) I kept using the same solution on the Xpenology running on a HP microserver Gen8 that replaced it.
Fast forward a few years and I moved to Singapore without bringing the server over, but still needed a baseline level of ad-freedom.
For a while I used OPNsense (running on a Kodlix GK45) for this purpose, but after a few (several) months I grew tired of Suricata turning off seemingly randomly on the box (with little useable logs to troubleshoot and no improvement with the OPNsense patches) and sometimes the DNS service doing just the same.
The OPNsense box got decommissioned (it is waiting to be repurposed) and a Unifi USG (I had it sitting around unused since in Italy I moved to a Sophos firewall for my dual-wan needs) took over the basic firewall duties leaving me with my ad-invasion problem again.
Sunday last week I thought it was a good idea to get rid of my ad problem leveraging my recently purchased Synology DS120J in tandem with a used DS115J (yes, I did learn from the DS411Slim experience that a NAS is a single point of failure even when is supporting multiple disks).
Because I went through the process in the past I thought it was going to be a matter of a few minutes and a good idea to relax a bit during my study session for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional exam.
After almost 30 years dealing with computers I should have known better that often times “few minutes” becomes “few hours”.
In this case the time-stretching happened because I’m running DSM 7.0 instead of DSM 6.x like in my previous NAS and Synology in this major version changed the way some of the built-in services are managed.
Because of this change the directory structure changed too and the original script didn’t work out of the box anymore.
The former:/etc/zone/data/
in DSM7 becomes:/volume1/@appstore/DNSServer/named/etc/zone/data/
After hammering here and there for a while I got to a hack that seems to be working for me.
If someone wants to take a look at it I attached it in the GitHub issue here.
The usual disclaimer apply: there is no guarantee implied or expressed that it will work for anyone else, it’s totally unrelated to my current or past job and employers, and if the script is used I bear no responsibility for anything bad happening. You can read at the bottom the full, wordy, detail.
Because I passed my certification exam last Friday (Friday the 17th, what an auspicious day did I pick!) I feel much less guilty now of having subtracted two hours from my study and I hope with this post I will save some time for others trying to follow the same approach.