Hacker News Reader

Comment by bajsejohannes | Hacker News Reader

I do this, although only by saying

    sudo cp hosts.play /etc/hosts

    sudo cp hosts.work /etc/hosts

It's simple, and surprisingly efficient.

View on HN

I did this in the past too. The amazing thing is that it actually cures the addiction, not just the symptoms. On the first day you find yourself clicking on the reddit bookmark like an idiot every 20 mins, only to be redirected to localhost. After a few days the impulse is gone and you can actually go back to a non censured /etc/hosts: your self control is back. YMMV.

The only problem with this method is that if you modify your hosts file, you have to modify both.

sudo cp /etc/hosts /etc/hosts.bak && cat hosts.work >> /etc/hosts

sudo cp /etc/hosts.bak /etc/hosts

Note: I just wrote this now with no testing whatsoever.

Just create a Makefile or something that cats together hosts.common and hosts.work or hosts.play.

  all:
      cat hosts.common hosts.work.in > hosts.work
      cat hosts.common hosts.play.in > hosts.play

Make common changes to hosts.common and easily build your final hosts files.

  play:
     cat hosts.play | sudo tee /etc/hosts > /dev/null

  work:
     cat hosts.work | sudo tee /etc/hosts > /dev/null

How often do you modify your hosts file? I only ever find myself adding more things to block to it.

When I am working on Linux I do the same thing, except I have cron job copy hosts.work to hosts at 9am(insert your favorite get to work time) and hosts.play at 5pm. Works really well.

I wonder if one can do the same on Windows 7, some way of scheduling tasks easily.

Does this work with Chrome? I believe Chrome does it's own dns resolution and skips the host file. (I defiantly know it won't resolve localhost if you're offline)

I've edited my hosts file with various domain->ip mappings, and it's worked fine for me in chrome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com