I am running Pi-Hole at home (on a Ubuntu VM, no Raspberry Pi necessary). In addition I have a Wireguard VPN server which uses the DNS server from Pi-Hole. This way a have a system-wide ad blocker for my smartphone when connected to the VPN. The latency hit from this setup is barely noticeable.
Pi-Hole 4.3.2
81–90 of 224 posts
Re: Pi-Hole 4.3.2
#82[deleted]
Re: Pi-Hole 4.3.2
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Separate VLANs is the right answer. Phoning home is not an Amcrest-specific thing, all of my cameras (I have a handful of Amcrest and D-Link cameras, and one Reolink camera) try to do that. I've put them all in a separate VLAN which can't access anything, not even DNS. The NVR software lives on a different VLAN and is able to open connections to the cameras for recording. This setup works perfectly. Most importantly,…
What access point do you use the offers VLAN functionality?
For an actual AP, check out the Unifi AP line. https://www.ui.com/unifi/unifi-ap
For a home wireless router, you can buy a supported device and install OpenWRT. https://openwrt.org/supported_devices
Re: Pi-Hole 4.3.2
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Separate VLANs is the right answer. Phoning home is not an Amcrest-specific thing, all of my cameras (I have a handful of Amcrest and D-Link cameras, and one Reolink camera) try to do that. I've put them all in a separate VLAN which can't access anything, not even DNS. The NVR software lives on a different VLAN and is able to open connections to the cameras for recording. This setup works perfectly. Most importantly,…
What access point do you use the offers VLAN functionality?
The access point I use is a UniFi AP-AC-Pro. You can create multiple wifi networks and map each one to a separate VLAN. I also use UniFi switches and a UniFi Security Gateway, but really any equivalent that supports VLANs will work.
I believe I also accomplished the same thing with an Asus router/AP running DD-WRT, but that was a long time ago.
Re: Pi-Hole 4.3.2
#85Just recently I experimented going without my pi-hole or any ad blocker software for 4 weeks to see what would happen. My goodness the internet is a dumpster fire without it. So many pages lagging and slow to load. Things I wanted to click that jumped when an ad loaded resulting in miss clicks. Annoying things following me around. It was especially bad on mobile with the GDRP/Cookie notices and ad's to the point that…
If you’re into fun experiments, you can also try putting a few pennies into a jar whenever you visit a website or write a script to simply block the sites you need to visit.
That doesn’t sounds like a fun experiment at all!
Re: Pi-Hole 4.3.2
#86Can Pi-Hole block YouTube ads yet?
Not as far as I'm aware, no.
Re: Pi-Hole 4.3.2
#87I have Pi Hole running on my LAN and it's amazing. Also helped me identify that my Amcrest PoE security cameras aggressively phone home, even when no cloud functionality is configured on them. All the reason to keep them on their own VLAN and off the Internet.
Separate VLANs is the right answer. Phoning home is not an Amcrest-specific thing, all of my cameras (I have a handful of Amcrest and D-Link cameras, and one Reolink camera) try to do that. I've put them all in a separate VLAN which can't access anything, not even DNS. The NVR software lives on a different VLAN and is able to open connections to the cameras for recording. This setup works perfectly. Most importantly,…
How do you like the D-Links? I've got two plus one of their video recorder appliances, and have found them to be completely reliable but the app is hot garbage. Any tips?
Re: Pi-Hole 4.3.2
#88Just recently I experimented going without my pi-hole or any ad blocker software for 4 weeks to see what would happen. My goodness the internet is a dumpster fire without it. So many pages lagging and slow to load. Things I wanted to click that jumped when an ad loaded resulting in miss clicks. Annoying things following me around. It was especially bad on mobile with the GDRP/Cookie notices and ad's to the point that…
> My goodness the internet is a dumpster fire without it. So many pages lagging and slow to load.
Yeah, people always knock pi-hole for not blocking "everything" like browser-based blockers do, but even though it's not perfect it still makes a huge difference. Due to some network changes I had to go without pi-hole for a couple days after having previously used it for years, and you never really appreciate how much crap pi-hole traps until it's gone.
Re: Pi-Hole 4.3.2
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's your reasoning on running it on a VPS as opposed to a raspi on your local network?
Because it’s available everywhere e.g. work/family/friends etc. and I can share it with family/friends as well. It’s a lot of fun to see people’s reactions when they see what the net can be like without all of the ads.
I run mine at home but have opened it up to be accessible remotely (just port 53 remotely) so I can use it whilst out and about.
Re: Pi-Hole 4.3.2
#90I already have uBlock Origin on Firefox, with tracking protection set to strict and I don't really remember seeing ads on desktop. I guess the main benefit of the PiHole is to have ad blocking on mobile devices, iPads... and others, do you think this is worth the effort of setting up in your experience?
You can see a screenshot from my VPN pihole blocking tracking requests from my android phone and make a decision do you need it or not. https://i.imgur.com/Hpcw42h.png
Without list of sites it blocks those numbers are useless. I could setup to block only news.ycombinator.com and the result would be similar