Toolsmith Snapshot: Ad Blocking With Pi Hole

Pi-hole is a DNS sinkhole that protects your devices from unwanted content, without installing any client-side software.

Pi-hole Overview

From the Pi-hole overview:

• Easy-to-install: versatile installer, takes less than ten minutes
• Resolute: content is blocked in non-browser locations, such as ad-laden mobile apps and smart TVs
• Responsive: speeds up browsing by caching DNS queries
• Lightweight: runs smoothly with minimal hardware and software requirements
• Robust: command line interface quality assured for interoperability
• Insightful: responsive Web Interface dashboard to view and control Pi-hole
• Versatile: optionally functions as DHCP server, ensuring all your devices are protected automatically
• Scalable: capable of handling hundreds of millions of queries when it is installed on server-grade hardware
• Modern: blocks ads over both IPv4 and IPv6
• Free: open source software

Important Note: This information is from docs.pi-hole.net.

• The Pi-hole setup offers eight options for an upstream DNS Provider during the initial setup.
• Utilize the Pi-hole command line interface with ease.
• Pi-hole includes a caching and forwarding DNS server, now known as FTLDNS. After applying the blocking lists, it forwards requests made by the clients to configured upstream DNS server(s).
• Updating is as simple as running the following command:

  pihole -up

Pi-hole Installation

I installed Pi-hole on a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B running Raspbian Stretch (Novemver 2018, 4.14 kernel).

Figure 1: Pi-hole on Raspberry Pi 2 Model B

There is a one-step automated installation method for those who want to get started quickly and conveniently. You can use the following command:

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

There are alternative installation methods if you’re not comfortable piping to bash.

Piloting Pi-hole

Once you’ve completed installation, browse to the IP address you established during setup. After running Pi-hole for even a few hours, it will begin to serve you as designed, and well at that.

Figure 2: Pi-hole at work

Take note of the fact that 17.9 percent of traffic and 532 specific queries. Pi-hole’s Gravity script is key here: “Gravity is one of the most important scripts of Pi-hole. Its main purpose is to retrieve blocklists, and then consolidate them into one unique list for the built-in DNS server to use, but it also serves to complete the process of manual whitelisting, blacklisting, and wildcard update. It is run automatically each week, but it can be invoked manually at any time.”

As seen in Figure 3, Pi-hole takes exception to a number of:

Figure 2: Pi-hole blocks

192.168.248.12 is my iPhone on my local network. You can see that between Apple, Microsoft, and other domains there’s more than a bit of content in their ad streams that is flagged as less than desirable via Pi-hole’s Block Lists.

Enjoy the use and benefits of Pi-hole; I’d really like to hear your success stories and how you’re running Pi-hole (what hardware platforms?). Let me know via Twitter or in the comments below.

Until next time, cheers!