Let’s start with the script. This downloads two adlists and combines them into one. Then we’re restarting the service to pick up the changes. The reason for using curl instead of wget is because wget refused to work with https on my ddwrt build .

wget -qO /tmp/mvps http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt
curl -k https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts|grep "^0.0.0.0" >> /tmp/mvps
killall -HUP dnsmasq
stopservice dnsmasq && startservice dnsmasq

Go to Administration -> Commands. Paste it in there and execute “Run Commands”.

Then, use the same command but execute it as Save Startup. Why? Well, I wanted to use a cron scheduler to run the script on a regular basis, but it just refused to work. Thus, I’m just scheduling a weekly reboot, which will trigger this command to update the ad lists

All you have left is to enable DNSMasq and Local DNS in Services tab. Then in the Additional Dnsmasq options add this:

addn-hosts=/tmp/mvps

Then go to Administration->Keep Alive and schedule a weekly/monthly reboot. Although, if the cron is broken in your build, this may not work either (to check, you can ssh to your router and check the timestamp on the /tmp/mvps file). In that case, you may just have to manually rerun the script from time to time to get the latest ad list.

Update 2020: I finally switched to pfsense and using pfBlockerNG provides a much better experience. Pi-hole is another great option – also much better than tinkering with dd-wrt.