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Hosts file updater wordkflow for OS X

Thursday 15th April

After reading of the evils on the interweb and not finding an alternative to doing it myself I've put this little workflow for Automator together to automate downloading and installing a lovly little host file that should keep the bad guys a bay.

Download workflow here

What it does

hosts file updater (Catchy name I know) downloads the latest hosts file from http://www.mvps.org and then puts it in the appropriate place on your machine. If your not sure what a hosts file is visit http://www.mvps.org and it will get you up to speed. The long and short of it is that, appart from it's origional use, you can also use a hosts file to make your computer a little more secure from the bad guys.

Something to note before you use it, it REPLACES your existing hosts file so if you have edited it at all, thoes edits will be lost. So please for the love of God BACK IT UP before your try using this workflow.

Also note that I have included 2 workflows, one has a Growl notification action, thats all that is different, if you don't have Growl installed you can go to the Growl web site and download all this bits to make that work but it's not essential.

To get the most out of this I would save it as an iCal Alarm and have it run once a month just to keep you upto date.

It does ask for a password when it run's because the files and folders we are dealing with all requier admin priverledges to tinker with them, you could hard code your password into it but as the hole point of this is to make your Mac that little bit more secure I strongly sugest NOT doing that!

It is important that you understand what a host file is before you use this because you may find it effects some web sites you visit so go investigate first!

Right I have to go and pretend to work again, I hope it is usefull and if anyone has any comments you can twitter at me

Better stuff (added Update 30th April 2010)

I posted this workflow hint thing to macosxhints.com a few days ago. Since then a few people have commented and added better ways to do what this workflow does so I do sugest flowing this link and having a read.

I would also like to point you to opendns.com who offer a free service that can protect you from nasty sites.

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