LebGeeks

Xodus_98

Member

Pi Hole - Ad Blocking

Hi,
ads are kind of annoying and they may potentially hold some sneaky scripts in case you have an unusual web surfing habit so i was looking for way to block them once and for all. Obviously the easiest answer to that is just installing a plug in for your browser that blocks ads well that may be good but recently a lot of website detect that and ask you to stop it in order to proceed. Hence why i went out and looked for more clever way to deal with and find out about Pi hole so here i would like to share it with you guys and how i ran it on my home network covering all my devices on my LAN from ads.

To start with i used a docker image which i ran it on my Qnap NAS i gave the container an IP and used it as my primary DNS server since Pi hole blocks ads using DNS after doing that i set up that dns ip as the primary dns to be distributed via DHCP to all the devices connected to my LAN results were really surprising the pi hole did a great job blocking most of the ads not only on the browser but even in apps since as mentioned above it work on DNS level ads get completely blocked it even blocked a lot of youtube ads but youtube is sort of a hit or miss but anything that lower the ad rate on youtube is more than welcome ! you also get A lot of management over what is blocked and what is not via the easy to use web interface the pi hole provide. Overall im happy with pi hole it's easy to run doesn't require much resources and did not affect my gaming experience at all.

Last edited by Xodus_98 (September 20 2019)

MSD

Member

Re: Pi Hole - Ad Blocking

FYI, Ad not Add
:)
Also, DNS66 does that on Android, not sure on other OSs

Xodus_98

Member

Re: Pi Hole - Ad Blocking

@MSD i did not know about that app tbh i tried to avoid using apps or pre existing dns for 2 reasons one being security and the other is for latency

AVOlio

Member

Re: Pi Hole - Ad Blocking

So what do I need for pihole to work?
A separate computer?

Xodus_98

Member

Re: Pi Hole - Ad Blocking

@ AVOlio you do need a separate computer in theory but you can run a VM on your own computer install linux server and then pull the docker image on it but then whenever you turn off your pc you lose access to the vm.tho you can buy a small raspberry pi zero from aliexpress and run the pi hole server on it. it cost only 12$ and should be more than enough to run pi hole and for tutorial on how to do it linus tech tips did a video covering that method.

ap4ss3rby

Member

Re: Pi Hole - Ad Blocking

It is rather simple if you have a pi. Just flash raspbian lite (because this pi will not connect to a display). Install pi hole, then make sure you have a static ip address. and you can actually set up the pi headlessly.