Setting Up a Pi Hole Made My Home Network Faster

Please add "Pi-Hole" to the title, this is just the umpteenth post about that and the title is clickbait.

This is essentially a better-managed, centralised equivalent to the long-standing practice of using the HOSTS file to block unwanted sites at the DNS level.<p>Unfortunately it seems there&#x27;s now a desire for browsers (and soon, maybe other applications&#x2F;systems will follow) to make DNS requests inside HTTPS tunnels (DoH), but maybe that&#x27;ll just encourage more the use of MITM proxies which have almost become a taboo amongst the force of &quot;HTTPS everything&quot; security-authoritarianism. Web security these days may be just as much focused on securing the profits of the advertising and tracking companies as it is against malware and actual user hostilities...

I was thinking of a device similar to a pi-hole for blocking TV commercials. It plugs into your TV&#x27;s HDMI port and somehow as soon as a commercial starts it switches to playing some relaxing music or a low key picture slide show. Even just switching to a blank screen would be better than the commercials yelling at me. Not really sure if it is feasible because it would have to have the smarts to distinguish between the actual tv show and a commercial but I&#x27;d play good money for something like this. And for bonus there would be some running metrics, just like how those water fountains that say something like &quot;saved 3432 plastic bottles from entering the environment,&quot; this would say &quot;saved you for seeing 242 hours of commercials&quot;

Pi holes were already discussed extensively and at length a few months ago:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18075159" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18075159</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.troyhunt.com&#x2F;mmm-pi-hole&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.troyhunt.com&#x2F;mmm-pi-hole&#x2F;</a>

Tempting because playing with Raspberry Pis is always quite fun. I&#x27;m not sure why - I can spend an hour doing something on a Pi that would make me groan to bother with otherwise.<p>But a question for anyone who&#x27;s done this Presumably most of the computing devices in your home make their way onto other networks from time to time. So you need a per-device solution to the ad infestation in any case. What&#x27;s the point of adding a house-wide one?<p>This is the consideration that&#x27;s stopped me doing this so far - the adblocker I currently use is going to have to remain in place regardless, so what would a Pi Hole add (other than a pleasurable hour or so toying around)?<p>[Edit: I don&#x27;t have a smart tv, google home or similar net-connected but unhackable device]

What I&#x27;m still missing is something which could detect and remove native advertising. I&#x27;m paying $10 to youtube every month specifically to get rid of ads, but then basically every content creator has native advertising baked in which youtube doesn&#x27;t remove. It would be great if the creators needed to mark the start and end of native ads so that youtube could just jump over them for me.

If your home router is a pfSense device, you can do this in-router, by installing pfBlockerNG. No Pi necessary.

Honest question - with such an emphasis and desire for security in the home network, how is the Alexa justified?

Any pointers on a good &quot;low risk&quot; pi-hole list that trades off maintenance effort versus blocking? I&#x27;m OK if it doesn&#x27;t block everything - just want it to run in the background with zero effort.

Worth exploring DNSCryptProxy as an alternative, too.<p>In addition to acting like pi hole and blocking certain hostnames, it allows you to encrypt your DNS lookups for anything forwarded to DoH or DNS Crypt supported services.

I setup a rpi+pihole a month ago after reading an HN post, and I was amazed at how much faster most browsing was (especially on phones).<p>I&#x27;ve only had a couple of things that didn&#x27;t work because of the pihole, and honestly I found it faster to just make a phone be a 4g hotspot, connect my computer to that hotspot, get past the &quot;hump&quot;, then switch back to my home network. It&#x27;s not ideal, but it doesn&#x27;t happen often.

So genuine question, with PiHole how do you temporarily disable it for one website&#x2F;app?<p>With browser-based tools it is super easy to turn these things off when it breaks things (e.g. flight booking sites often fail miserably with an ad&#x2F;tracker blocker I&#x27;ve found). If you come across a website that breaks with PiHole do you have to change your DNS settings to get around it?

What&#x27;s the speed cap, though? Doesn&#x27;t it turn whatever your connection speed is into &quot;only as much as the pi can do&quot;?

Ah, another &quot;I managed to set up a Pi-Hole&quot;-post. Love it. Maybe need a dozen more of those with some clickbaity titles...

So I did this too. The downside is that if that pihole server goes down your entire network loses DNS access.

Does using a Pi hole break any websites?<p>I&#x27;m curious if any websites use JS to check if the ad was successfully loaded.

Had a spare Rpi sitting around and just set this up... it&#x27;s working like a charm so far. Before this, I was feeling annoyed that even though I was subscribing and paying sites like WPo, I was still getting blocked from reading articles if an ad-blocker was on. With the Pi-hole that problem is solved, and browsing seems faster as a bonus as well.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;StevenBlack&#x2F;hosts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;StevenBlack&#x2F;hosts</a><p>Solve all my problems with ads and also effective against social, porn and gaming addiction.

You can also just change your computer or routers DNS settings as such: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18788410" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18788410</a><p>This approach has way less overhead than pihole... But now someone else knows what you&#x27;re browsing.<p>Edit: the top comment specifies the hostname incorrectly. It should be: dns.adguard.com (not .org)

I bought a raspberry pi and ran pi hole but it keeps turning off for some reason. I guess I got a faulty raspberry pi? But when it does go down all my browsing dies because no dns requests could be processed. So I went with running it in a docket container on my nas instead.

So what’s the advantage of running the docket setup of Pi hole versus the normal Pi install?

I&#x27;ve found a few apps that are able to get around this. The Youtube app on my phone is still able to load ads even when I use this method, and the Hulu app on my Playstation.<p>Does anyone know how they&#x27;re able to do this and if there is a solution?

You don&#x27;t need a Raspberry Pi for this. Just install dnscrypt-proxy.

Not trying to be inflammatory, but to educate myself.<p>“Like any other project I run everything in a Docker container, and this project should be no different“<p>Why? I assume they don’t maintain their own image for home use

For some reason, the Google Play Store stops working when I try to route my DNS traffic through OvenVPN to a Pi-Hole running on my droplet. Anybody here know why?

Does using this to maximum effect mean I have to change the DNS for every device on my network or is there a single change I can make to my router?

I skimmed the blog and setup pi-hole at home. So far so good. I was mildly irritated at the Docker fanboy tone but that&#x27;s my own bias.

Why Raspberry Pi? That will be a serious bottle neck. Does he use 56Kbps modem?

Spammy blog.

How a single rasp pi made my browsing experience terrible and slowed page loads.<p>I turned off my pi hole.<p>Personal anecdote only

Yet more hardware junking up the world for people who can&#x27;t configure software. Got to wonder how rigorously people who install umpteen of these sorts of devices around their home maintain them.