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pi-hole?

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22over7:
Has anyone any experience with "pi-hole"? (https://pi-hole.net/).

I'm pretty intolerant of ad's, and for sometime have been using https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts. This constructs
a gigantic /etc/hosts, in which thousands of dns names are "/dev/null"d.  This has not been problem-free.

Then I came across pi-hole, and installed it on a (3B) pi that I was using as a cups server for some ancient non-wifi printers,
and doing little else.  I put this top of the DNS servers for a machine or two, just out of curiosity.  So far, I'm quite
impressed. For one thing, I can allow a handful of sites (like kitz.co.uk, sndbforums.com, ..) to show me ads, in the hope that
it thereby might bring them in a few pennies. There's a nice admin-page (it sets up a lighttpd server) where you can configure such things.
I can now see some unobtrusive ads on the kitz sites, and elsewhere.

I've only been using it a day or two.  It's quite crisp, given that the pi involved has fallen down behind an immensely heavy metal filing cabinet,
and has rather dodgy wifi accessibility. I wondered about getting another lower-specced pi, ethernet connected to my router, and powered
via a router USB port.  It doesn't seem to need a 3B.

Does anyone here use a pi-hole "in anger"?  Any gotchas? Advice?

pooclah:

I’ve never used this but it certainly looks interesting.  I have an old Pi Zero gathering dust somewhere and when I get time I’ll try it out on that.

Thank you for pointing it out.

Kevin

VDSL2User:
Yes I used it for about 3 weeks and it works well.
You do need control over the DNS settings for clients for it to work best.
I first ran it as the upstream DNS from the router but in this mode it does not record client usage
but shows all requests as from the router IP.
I then ran it as the DHCP server (instead of the router) as well as the DNS and this provided a great solution.
There is a lot of details and support for it on the Internet.
It then wet my appertite to go further and gain more control of my local network and I
now run pfSense with the pfBlockerNG plugin (which does the same thing as Pi-Hole) and so
now have everything in one box.

chenks:
i used it for a while, but it is worse than just using an adblock browser extension.
it couldn't handle blocking youtube ads natively, so it resulted in having to run both an adblocker extension anyway.
i dumped it shortly after that as it became pointless.

jid:
Likewise, I tried it for a few weeks and I found it blocking more pages and content completely. There is a lot of tweaking involved to get it working. It has a good online community with lots of tips and advice, the Whitelist suggestions they have on there helped a lot.

I still found it sometimes not blocking ads, or just blocking the whole site altogether. It also played havoc with my Hive Heating. The app would take a minute to refresh data from my thermostats.

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