Acrylic DNS Proxy HOSTS


Upon installation Acrylic is preconfigured to point to the Google Public DNS servers.

You can change that by selecting the "Open Acrylic Configuration" menu item of the Acrylic UI desktop application or by opening the AcrylicConfiguration.ini file with a text editor. You can also change the contents of Acrylic HOSTS file by selecting the "Open Acrylic Hosts" menu item of the Acrylic UI desktop application or by opening the AcrylicHosts.txt file with a text editor.

Be aware that in order to use Acrylic you need to configure your network interface so that the DNS servers to be contacted for name resolution are no more your ISP's but Acrylic. The details of how to do it depend on the version of your OS:


For detailed information about the syntax of the Acrylic HOSTS file here is the latest default AcrylicHosts.txt file:

#
# 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