Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements

Previous discussion from a few months ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19258717" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19258717</a>

Also, owners or routers able to run OpenWRT (which is actively maintained and in great shape since the merge with LEDE), you have access to several packages providing the same technical solution (DNS-based blocking). As far as I know, the most common and maintained is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;openwrt&#x2F;packages&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;net&#x2F;adblock&#x2F;files" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;openwrt&#x2F;packages&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;net&#x2F;adblock&#x2F;...</a> .<p>Super easy to install, full-featured, lots of lists to pick from, auto-updates lists, no need for an additional device, and you will benefit from router features produced by the openwrt community and maybe unavailable in your router proprietary firmware. Much recommended.<p>If that sounds attractive and it sounds like a good opportunity to change your crumbling unpatched router, the question <i>&quot;what&#x27;s today&#x27;s good cheap router running openwrt without trouble?&quot;</i> is frequently answered by <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;openwrt&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;openwrt&#x2F;</a> :) .

Pi-hole is my most prized addition to my connected home. It was simple to set up, easy to manage, and easy to access for whitelisting. Now, all of my devices throughout my network benefit from the service, as opposed to relying on locally installed solutions.<p>If you aren&#x27;t using it, you should!

[tinfoilhat] Given that Chrome now became Google&#x27;s weapon against adblocking, how long until it starts refusing to use Pi-hole specifically?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20044430" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20044430</a> [&#x2F;tinfoilhat]

Why hasn&#x27;t anyone, or pi-hole themselves, made a public DNS that does this? Pass everything not on the blocklist thru to 1.1.1.1.<p>The fact that this requires special hardware, bash commands, etc is severely limiting the audience. The more people blocking ads the quicker the internet changes.<p>Edit: thanks for the replies!

If you&#x27;re running some type of hypervisor (ESXi, Proxmox, etc.), you can create a tiny VM running Debian and load Pi-hole on it. No need for extra hardware and wires.

With all the fervor around ad-blocking what I fail to see is how do you propose those sites that you visit, read their content to make money ? Are you willing to pay every site you visit or encourage them to put up pay walls ??

Ad blocking via DNS is relatively easy right now because a content provider like CNN.com will use a domain like “ads.evil-surveillance-media.com” to load their ads into your browser. But what happens if all these companies switch to just using their own domain to load ads? If the ads as well as the content BOTH come from CNN.com then there will be no easy way to filter the ads out. This will be the next stage in this war between ads and adblockers.

Is it easy to disable adblocking on sites that won&#x27;t work with adblockers? I like to have the option to disable adblocking in my toolbar. For example, certain bank websites, business websites, etc.

File this away for the holidays, too: Pi-holes and NAS backup devices make good gifts.<p>I know it doesn’t sound very sentimental, but the first time I showed my relatives what the Internet looks like without ads, I think those were the strongest hugs I ever got from family members.

I&#x27;ve just tried it via the install script they provide and it was amazing. Took me through a simple checklist of stuff automating everything it could and giving me nice Curses interfaces for stuff where it needed me. Up and running within 5 mins!

I keep meaning to set one up one of these days. Does anyone know what effect a Pi-hole has on internet speed? I play a few games where latency is a big deal, and don&#x27;t really want to artificially throttle my internet.

I love pi-hole. It&#x27;s very passive and easy to use. My only issue was when the pi hosting it went down for whatever reason and I didn&#x27;t know immediately, so I thought my ISP connection went down. I just had to restart the pi to get it going again. It&#x27;s only happened once in around 6 months. And it&#x27;s running on one of my older pi!

I haven’t tried Pi-Hole yet but this was the impetus I needed to decide to set it up tonight.<p>I commented on a different post last night, that I was a bit shocked and saddened to see their Patreon is only pulling in $1,700&#x2F;mo.<p>Do they have another significant revenue stream? Is it just too much hassle to bother signing up to Patreon to commit to even $1&#x2F;mo? Do they have something on the Admin panel where users can click to pay directly?<p>I’m not judging, I don’t even <i>have</i> a Patreon account. I’m curious how such an apparently crucial and useful piece of software — one that no doubt is responsible for providing millions of dollars of value to its users, and perhaps blocking tens of millions of dollars in ads — how can the project be sustainable after 53 releases and 2,700 issues on Github while pulling in less than $24k&#x2F;yr?

I like Pi-hole but it ended up causing more trouble than it was worth for me.<p>First, certain streaming websites would fail and it was too much trouble to try to find the URL to whitelist.<p>Then after I had disabled it from the Pi-hole interface everything was fine but it wasn&#x27;t actually active. No problem...until I forgot my router was using it as a DNS server and I moved and didn&#x27;t set my Pi up yet. Then it took me a couple weeks going back and forth with Comcast to find out that my router was still pointing to a DNS server that wasn&#x27;t running.<p>Somehow my FireTV bypassed the bad DNS server at one point (still no idea how this happened cause my router was routing all traffic through the IP for pi-hole) and that made me realize that I can get data from Comcast somehow so maybe it really was my router.

The pages you use the most serve some ads from their own domain. E.g. Youtube et. al.<p>Also beware as most ads in your phone apps come from ad intermediaries that are either dynamic or constantly change.<p>Pi-Hole is a cool project but please take in consideration those two when using it. We are far from the 90&#x27;s in ad-tech.

Anyone else seeing:<p><pre><code> [] Root user check \e[1;32m.;;,. .ccccc:,. :cccclll:. ..,, :ccccclll. ;ooodc &#x27;ccll:;ll .oooodc .;cll.;;looo:. \e[1;31m.. &#x27;,&#x27;. .&#x27;,,,,,,&#x27;. .&#x27;,,,,,,,,,,. .&#x27;,,,,,,,,,,,,.... ....&#x27;&#x27;&#x27;,,,,,,,&#x27;....... ......... .... ......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ......... .... ......... ........,,,,,,,&#x27;...... ....&#x27;,,,,,,,,,,,,. .&#x27;,,,,,,,,,&#x27;. .&#x27;,,,,,,&#x27;. ..&#x27;&#x27;&#x27;.\e[0m [] OS distribution not supported</code></pre>

I haven&#x27;t moved mine off of the Pi personally, but I&#x27;ve read positive reports of people using Digital Ocean or similar to host PI-Hole. That could also, in theory, allow it to be used while remote or for mobile devices.

I love the idea of pi-hole. However, I run my own local DNS server already. And my DNS server is actually serving some local domains for various servers, etc. on the network. Can I in any way get the list of domains to block from the pi-hole project and use them in my own regular Bind DNS server?

Apparently it blocks some domains necessary for the Washington Post articles to load. Whitelisting washingtonpost.com doesn&#x27;t remove the adblock notice :(

I&#x27;m running pi-hole in a docker container on an Intel NUC; no need for an actual-factual Raspberry Pi. Works great.

Pi-hole users should know that in the default configuration it allows your ISP to reconfigure your blocklists at will due to lack of authentication:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pi-hole&#x2F;pi-hole&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2704" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pi-hole&#x2F;pi-hole&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2704</a>

Does anyone have a recipe for using pihole via OpenVPN using docker?<p>I&#x27;m using this[1] but I&#x27;m surprised there isn&#x27;t something more official&#x2F;baked.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mr-bolle&#x2F;docker-openvpn-pihole" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mr-bolle&#x2F;docker-openvpn-pihole</a>

I was looking at their github repo and couldn&#x27;t immediately see where pihole gets its block lists, just a very large soup of shell scripting that seems to make a lot of assumptions about your Linux distro.<p>Anybody familiar with this code able to point out where it does the &quot;interesting&quot; work?

Can you tell from the command line what version Pi you&#x27;re running? I think mine&#x27;s an original B+, but not sure. I typically get sub-millisecond DNS resolution (presumably from cache).<p>&gt;root@pihole:~# uptime &gt; 17:02:51 up 587 days, 22:34, 1 user, load average: 0.03, 0.03, 0.05

I love the pi-hole, but I can&#x27;t seem to figure out how to get resolving of .local hostnames back when I use it. Like, I can no longer ping my media server at media.local, I have to use the exact IP address. Not a deal breaker, but annoying.

I was planning on installing this on my RPi3B but I wonder due to its low compute power could result in a somewhat slower experience in my home network. Could anyone comment on what his experience has been in this case?

I have set up a Siri Shortcut on my phone so that I can disable the blocking for 5 minutes very easily. Highly recommended if you have family members that occasionally need something unblocked.

I run pihole on Raspberry Pi with recommended block lists and it’s been an absolute pleasure. Raspberry Pi runs with a static IP I changed DNS settings the devices I want to go through pihole.

A router that I can install Pi-hole and host a VPN on would be a dream.

Given how Google has, literally this morning, informed me that they&#x27;re discontinuing text-only AdSense units, I can&#x27;t think of a more appropriate time.

Pro-tip: pi-hole will eat SD cards in a rpi if you enable logging. Use industrial flash (e.g., seissbit) to avoid a headache every six months.

i am very much intrigued by this, atleast from consumer prespective. I am completed noob, is it &quot;simple&quot; enought to set up?

have a nanopc-t4 laying around that i wanna try for a pi-hole + opnsense install. looks like i&#x27;ll need to add a usb3 ethernet card unless i want to live with 50% the line speed and putz around with tagged vlans using a single nic...although 50% of 1GBit is a lot more throughput than i can get through my isp.<p>anyone have this type of setup?

Anyone doing a pi-hole version for android? We all have an old phone that could be used instead of a rpi.

Interesting. How would this integrate into a network running DNS Resolver (i.e. Unbound) in pfSense?

I assume, like everything else, Pi-Hole usage can be detected and used to fingerprint users?

Pi-hole is fantastic! I run it on my Rockpro64 at home.<p>Previous discussions =&gt;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19258717" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19258717</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13857887" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13857887</a>

Is this available as a Synology package I could install on my Synology NAS?

Couldn&#x27;t apps start hard coding DNS servers to avoid pi-holes?

Pi-hole is fantastic and I will <i>gladly</i> donate to them.

if only pi-hole could block the in-app ads that served from the same host :( sneaky youtube, the ads are becoming more and more

Love the name and the product looks amazing.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lostinablackhole.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lostinablackhole.com&#x2F;</a>

content is blocked in non-browser locations, such as ad-laden mobile apps and smart TVs

can this block Hulu ads and maintain access?