Pi-Hole Appreciation

jgsi

After a month of having a linux box fired up running pi-hole,I have to say I am truly impressedand it takes a fair bit to say that about any piece of modern tech.
Anyone in this day and age with multiple devices polling 'tnernet at home should be thinking about 1.
You can actually buy one pre loaded from pi-hole.net if your linux skills are lacking.
Long live black holes.

(

Pross

I think the cat just ran across your keyboard JGSI.

Lagrange

He is right, I've seen it making a big difference on a smartphone!

photonic69

I keep meaning to set one up at home running off a spare Pi I have from the kids.

Problem was I ran out of ports on our routers - we have two, one in upstairs office where the HSBB modem is and one acting as a repeater downstairs, but all ports were taken with networked printers, NAS drives and Xbox's. I bought an unmetered Ethernet switch and some short patch cables. Trouble is I can't find a set-up guide for a system configured like mine. Unsure which router to set it up on - primary one up in loft conversion/office or downstairs repeater where most of our phones and laptops are used. Each router has a different name and IP.

JGSI - do you have any resources you can point me to that might help?

jgsi

pi-hole.net has the hardware for sale.
I just pinched a mini pizza box windows pc when we put in chromebits for display TVs and put Ubuntu on it.
Reddit is one place to look for pi hole info.
My home setup is
BT router homehub5 connected via lan cable to the linux box . Pi Hole is the dhcp server with the service disabled on the BT hub.
Pi Hole does its DNS miracles.
Everything is kept quite default but I did add an additional BLOCKLIST using a csv file.

maybe an additional switch or one with more ports?

photonic69

Thanks. My setup is quite different to yours I'm afraid. I've got all the hardware as my daughter lost interest in her Raspberry Pi so I have seconded it.

Networks and DNS's and IP's are a little confusing for me. Luckily I have a teenage boy so I'll set him on the task over half term to get it all working.

I too used to run an Ubuntu PC. I quite liked the OS and with Open Office etc. Trouble was the kids complained as it wasn't like the stuff they had at school and formatting of some docs went a bit funny for them so relented and bought a decent family PC.

Ben6899

I recognise a lot of the words, but the reference points are... alien.

Mornington Crescent.

jgsi

Thats the joy of the buy one preloaded option. ok costs a bit £70 or so, but seriously cuts the crap that your internet devices send out - adverts and tracking and are only a small part.
I can listen to free Deezer with naff all interrupts from the ads... I think it works for Spotify as well.
Your free Apple/Android apps that are plastered with in app guff - no see no guff when PiHole is deployed.
YouTube paid promotions midway thru the video? Not good if you are doing a GCN turbo session.
Gone.

kingstongraham

I guess it will end up with everyone paying for stuff directly if enough people block adverts.

jgsi

It's not actually 'blocking'. Subtle difference.
The normal ad blocker run on a computer is blatantly obvious to the web provider as to it being blocked.
Using a Pi hole, there is simply no breadcrumb trail for annoyed web site providers to get annoyed about and putting on prices.
Obviously it dont get you access to a 'paywall' just to be clear.

robert88

JGSI wrote:

pi-hole.net has the hardware for sale.
I just pinched a mini pizza box windows pc when we put in chromebits for display TVs and put Ubuntu on it.
Reddit is one place to look for pi hole info.
My home setup is
BT router homehub5 connected via lan cable to the linux box . Pi Hole is the dhcp server with the service disabled on the BT hub.
Pi Hole does its DNS miracles.
Everything is kept quite default but I did add an additional BLOCKLIST using a csv file.

maybe an additional switch or one with more ports?

Just think, not so long ago and this would have been complete gibberish. Ain't science wonderful.

kingstongraham

JGSI wrote:

It's not actually 'blocking'. Subtle difference.
The normal ad blocker run on a computer is blatantly obvious to the web provider as to it being blocked.
Using a Pi hole, there is simply no breadcrumb trail for annoyed web site providers to get annoyed about and putting on prices.
Obviously it dont get you access to a 'paywall' just to be clear.

If people aren't seeing the adverts, companies aren't going to pay for the adverts.

jgsi

How 'they' gonna know?

kingstongraham

JGSI wrote:

How 'they' gonna know?

From the way noone clicks through any more?

jgsi

I dont think we need to a 'worry' like to our lives currently.
I just like to be able to trawl a website without popups and all sorts making itself a nuisance on the internet.
At the moment the pihole is blocking very effectively the erroneous traffic the older ipad is generating because the grandkids will be playing their daft games on it. Its saving 40% of bandwidth at the moment.. winner , winner.

jgsi

I dont think we need to add a 'worry' like to our lives currently.
I just like to be able to trawl a website without popups and all sorts making itself a nuisance on the internet.
At the moment the pihole is blocking very effectively the erroneous traffic the older ipad is generating because the grandkids will be playing their daft games on it. Its saving 40% of bandwidth at the moment.. winner , winner.

chris_bass

I don't like ads either but I also don't want to have to pay for websites. Although they might think you are still seeing them if the ads aren't generating any extra income then they will stop placing them in that site. That site will still need to make money, this will either be done by charging to view the site or having some kind of paid for content. They may even get paid for product placements and so it'll be harder to trust reviews and things like that.

I leave ads on but don't click them so I guess I'm as bad, hopefully there are enough tech unsavvy people out there who are more susceptible to ads to help subsidise us all!

mr_goo

Ben6899 wrote:

I recognise a lot of the words, but the reference points are... alien.

Mornington Crescent.

:P

thistle_

Is this just a hardware version of adding all the ad servers to your hosts file and redirecting to 127.0.0.1 back in the old days?

jgsi

Were we festooned with ad traffic back in the day?
Having said that, pihole really is aimed at the domestic setup and you want to cover multiple platform devices, not just one PC.
However, it has crossed our minds to deploy one in our data centre behind our Fortigates.

photonic69

For those that don't believe, try this:

Open up a new tab on your browser. Press f12 to open up the Browser Console and click the Network tab. Go to a website - online news such as Sun or Daily Mail are good examples here. It will now list all the craplets and background data that is being downloaded for that page. Most of it you never see and can be tracking crapware. On my example this was over 160 and was 5MB in size!!! Just times that by all the web pages you visit daily. A Pi-Hole can reduce that to about 1/10 so you can appreciate the benefits this device can do.

Edit: next link I clicked on from that page has now over 500 craplets and 11MB of data downloaded just from viewing a page!!!

Pross

Two pages in and I still don't have a clue what a pi-hole is, I thought it was slang for your mouth!

rjsterry

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi-hole

I had to look it up, too.

jgsi

I had to rebuild a pihole on a Raspberrypi.
Dont be tempted to load extra Blocklists (2.6million entries) otherwise you spend 2 weeks whitelisting domains due to local user complaints - stick with the default ones.

pinno

Uh! Wtf? Can someone translate please?

[Track mitts save my knuckles from being grazed whilst walking]

meursault

I think it's something about cakes, at least. that's how I read it.

Back in the day (Hovis theme music) I read a biography about Linus Torvalds, interesting guy.