Fixing Ad blocking and getadmiral.com annoyances

[beerguzzle]

I use pfblockerng to squelch ads to my webpages. Lately I have been annoyed by a lot of sites (example: https://www.al.com/) blocking my web traffic, with getadmiral. It steps in front of the page telling me to turn off my ad blockers. Grrr.

I fired up tcpdump and wireshark to look at the traffic. I noticed a strange DNS lookup to succeedscene.com every time; a bit a googling implied that it was associated with Admiral. My Netgate resolved it to 0.0.0.0 but outside resolvers gave real DNS numbers. So I did via shell on the Netgate:

cd /var/adm/pfblockerng
find . -type f -print | xargs grep succeedscene

I found it listed in StevenBlack_Ads.orig and Easylist.orig. So I added this domain to pfBlockerNG/DNSBL/DNSBL Whitelist, then reloaded the rules via pfBlockerNG/Update. Voila, my netgate resolved the domain.

This fixed my blockages with Admiral. I can now go to al.com, nj.com, masslive.com, etc and see the webpages with no ads. Life is good again.