41 lines
2.4 KiB
Markdown
41 lines
2.4 KiB
Markdown
|
---
|
||
|
|
%{
|
||
|
|
title: "Pi-Hole Love",
|
||
|
|
id: "pihole-love",
|
||
|
|
date: ~N[2018-03-24 14:00:00],
|
||
|
|
author: "Adam Piontek",
|
||
|
|
tags: ["home", "privacy", "tech", "raspberrypi"],
|
||
|
|
}
|
||
|
|
---
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
2021 UPDATE: while the pi-hole is a very cool project, I eventually grew tired of maintaining a separate DNS service. I still use unbound on my edgerouter but now my raspberry pi just runs some local web services.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
Original post below:
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
<!--more-->
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
I'm really liking my [Pi-Hole](https://pi-hole.net/)
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
Katie gave me a Raspberry Pi Zero W for Christmas, and while it's also inspired other projects to come down the line, I finally settled on using it for Pi-hole.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
It's better than an ad-blocker in your browser because it means the ads — and a lot of malware! — never get loaded in the first place. Nothing on your network can even *find* the stuff you don't want, so you save some meagre bandwidth, and computing power that would be spent scanning stuff as it comes in.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
It's really easy to set up and use — as long as you can change the DNS setting for your router — and has a helpful browser interface.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
The default block lists are plenty good, but since it's so easy to use it's well worth adding some more block lists.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
I'm using every "ticked" list from "[The Big Blocklist Collection](https://firebog.net/)," and it's working well so far.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
I also whitelisted several relevant domains from both the bottom of the Big Blocklist page, and Pi-hole's own "[Commonly Whitelisted Domains](https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/commonly-whitelisted-domains/212)" page.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
### What happens if something I need is blocked?
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
We found my partner couldn't use a website related to her profession. It would just get stuck loading and it wasn't clear why. With Chrome (can do this in Firefox, too) I was able to use F12 to open the DevTools, click Network, reload the page, and see in red what was failing to load.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
In this case, the Pi-hole was blocking "cdns.gigya.com," a content delivery service hosting a javascript the page wanted to use. Off to the Pi-hole web interface (or cli with `pihole -w`) to quickly whitelist, and the site worked again.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
The same for "prod.imgur.map.fastlylb.net," apparently needed for imgur to work.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
And the best part is you don't really need anything other than a Raspberry Pi Zero W, an SD card, and a micro USB power connection to make it work -- though I added in a USB OTG cable and a USB ethernet adapter I had laying around to avoid any issues with wifi.
|