Just recently I experimented going without my pi-hole or any ad blocker software for 4 weeks to see what would happen.<p>My goodness the internet is a dumpster fire without it. So many pages lagging and slow to load. Things I wanted to click that jumped when an ad loaded resulting in miss clicks. Annoying things following me around.<p>It was especially bad on mobile with the GDRP/Cookie notices and ad's to the point that on my iPhone SE some pages had a thin smear of the actual content no taller than a single line of text. News sites were especially bad for this.<p>With the experiment ended my pi-hole and ad blockers are now set to very on (and updated to this version and can confirm the block list went from 100,000 to 89,000) and I am much happier. Seems about 20% of the traffic on my network is blocked now which explains why some pages performed so awfully.<p>The ad industry really needs to up its game because the current state of the web is just horrible.
The one thing that's holding me back on actually using Pi-Hole is the lack of flexibility. What I'd really like to see is the ability to do various things on a per-client basis.<p>For example, one commenter wanted a simple "reload without blocking" functionality and the response was to use a bookmarklet plus the Pi-Hole API to disable it temporarily. This works, but the problem is that it disables it temporarily for everyone and will inevitably result in "Hey, why's the ad blocker broken?" "Oh, sorry, that was me" conversations.<p>Likewise, I'd also like to be able to configure block lists on a per-client basis. I don't want any Facebook stuff (for example) to resolve from my devices, but my girlfriend wants to use Facebook.<p>Similarly, I may want different rules on different networks. For example, I may want to restrict what my IoT network can resolve differently than my regular user network. This is really just a generalization of doing things on a per-client basis.<p>Currently the only solution to these types of problems is to maintain multiple Pi-Hole installations. This isn't a big deal if it's just one or two, but it doesn't scale reasonably.
Openwrt has DNS ad-blocking built in which works just as well as pi-hole. It simply doesn't have the monitoring of what is being blocked but it is rarely needed anyway.<p><a href="https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/ad-blocking" rel="nofollow">https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/ad-blocking</a>
I can't find this anywhere, but does Pi-Hole have any sort of client side 'reload without blocking' functionality? If I were to implement this in my network and a user has issues with a page not loading/functioning correctly, I feel like they'd need my help to add the site to a white list, which would be pretty inconvenient.
I've had my Pi-Hole for a month now.<p>It's great, but many blocklists are bad. People often use <a href="https://firebog.net/" rel="nofollow">https://firebog.net/</a> to get their blocklists, and use only those with a checkmark which are, quote, "least likely to interfere with browsing".<p>Bollocks, I've had to disable a few of the recommended ones, and adding manual whitelisted hosts because they were blocking legitimate sites (ocsp.apple.com), blocking Windows updates, blocking Instagram altogether!
I spent some time implementing a Pi-hole module for NixOS, but eventually decided to go for a much simpler setup: dns server (dnsmasq or unbound) + periodically updated hosts file (via systemd timer) passed to the dns server.<p>At the end of the day, that’s really all you need as a technical user, so I couldn’t justify he rest of what came with pi-hole, which I believe targets a less tech-savvy crowd.<p>YMMV and I’m very happy Pi-hole exists, I think I’m just not the target audience.<p>--<p>EDIT: see here[0] for an example configuration.<p>[0]: <a href="https://deadc0de.re/articles/unbound-blocking-ads.html" rel="nofollow">https://deadc0de.re/articles/unbound-blocking-ads.html</a>
I am running Pi-Hole at home (on a Ubuntu VM, no Raspberry Pi necessary). In addition I have a Wireguard VPN server which uses the DNS server from Pi-Hole. This way a have a system-wide ad blocker for my smartphone when connected to the VPN. The latency hit from this setup is barely noticeable.
This might be an alternative for people who are too lazy for setting up a pi-hole or desire things to be a couple of ms faster: <a href="https://simplednscrypt.org/" rel="nofollow">https://simplednscrypt.org/</a>
I'm a huge fan of this project! I have 3 set-up right now.<p>One as container on my Nuc at home for myself, and 2 other on old Pi's (one is a 1st gen B model) for family. A simple cron job to run every 2 months keeps everything up to date. For myself I use Wireguard to only forward DNS packets to the PiHole when I'm outside the house.<p>If you install a PiHole (and maybe Unchecky.com) your help desk calls from family will drop by 90% (personal experience).
I have Pi Hole running on my LAN and it's amazing. Also helped me identify that my Amcrest PoE security cameras aggressively phone home, even when no cloud functionality is configured on them. All the reason to keep them on their own VLAN and off the Internet.
As the situation has worsened with the latest release of Safari I'm really interested to globally setup Pi-Hole on a VPS via docker and use it in combination with VPN (Strongswan) for all of my devices (also mobile). Has anybody had success with such a setup yet?
I already have uBlock Origin on Firefox, with tracking protection set to strict and I don't really remember seeing ads on desktop.<p>I guess the main benefit of the PiHole is to have ad blocking on mobile devices, iPads... and others, do you think this is worth the effort of setting up in your experience?
Donno if this is a silly question or not. But if there anywhere to buy a raspberry + pi with pi-hole pre-configured on it?<p>I've wanted one for a while but just wanna plug it in and go to the web console, not buy it set it up install it etc.
Is this substantially better than using ublock origin? I feel like my browsing experience is pretty good right now, and I'm uncertain what the benefits to upgrading are.
One unadvertised advantage of pihole is monitoring and blocking sites that you don't want kids to use, such as the thousands of io-games and what not.
Preface: I'm moderately technical but don't understand the specific nuances of DNS.<p>Is there any possibility Pi-Hole and the DNS server plus hosts file could be used in an attack? Could I setup a web server with identical UI to my target site, get one of the list providers to direct chase.com to my IP, list gets propagated to all Pi-Hole devices, and start collecting credentials?
I set up a pi hole a few months ago. I'm not sure why I waited so long to do so. It's been great to be honest. Now and then someone in my family has a broken web app and I have to whitelist a few things. Confused my wife once or twice, but that's about the only downside. Now she knows to check with me if she doesn't get the expected result.
Isn't it easier to set it up with wireguard? I’ve recently set up my turris running “adblock” (openwrt) natively with only wireguard open, connecting from my laptop, ipad and iPhone, which seems to me to be a far lighter and easier setup ....
I’ve found any vpn including WireGuard running on mobile draining battery too much.<p>Disabling third party cookies works much better, and for mobile safari using free ka-block.
Not quite clear what they are replacing easylist with?<p>Like I get depreciating stuff but this seems like it’s still very much in active use? No plan B/transition?