11.14.2017

Pi-Hole Ad Blocker

I learned about Pi-Hole on a recent episode of the New Screen Savers.  Pi-Hole converts a Raspberry Pi (model 2/3) into a DNS server with a large database of advertising sites.  If a DNS querry is looking for one of the sites, Pi-Hole blacholes the request so ads are not served.  DNS servers can be configured via DHCP.  I set the Pi-Hole as my primary DNS and moved the OpenDNS servers down in my pFSense DHCP settings; this will let my computers failover to OpenDNS is the Pi-Hole is offline.

From a console on a Raspberry Pi (RPi) running the lastest Raspberian, run:

curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash 

The instlal will go through a wizard for settings and provide a passowrd when finished.  This password is needed to acces the Pi-Hole admin screen:

 pi-hole

Changing the password was not an option from the admin settings: for a password change, SSH into the RPi and enter:

pihole -a -p somepasswordhere

I disabled uBlock Origin on my browser and I cannot tell the differnece; the Pi-Hole appears to be at least as good as the extension.  it also will provide adblock for devices that cannot use uBlock- such as my phone or my Android tablet.