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Pi-Hole 4.3.2

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Re: Pi-Hole 4.3.2

#151

Preface: I'm moderately technical but don't understand the specific nuances of DNS. Is there any possibility Pi-Hole and the DNS server plus hosts file could be used in an attack? Could I setup a web server with identical UI to my target site, get one of the list providers to direct chase.com to my IP, list gets propagated to all Pi-Hole devices, and start collecting credentials?

At the moment, if an attacker has control of your DNS, it's game over before you even start. There are some technologies that help, such as secure DNS (DNSSEC) and "certificate pinning" but they don't do everything.

Re: Pi-Hole 4.3.2

#152
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

Is it still worthwhile to set up if I have ad blocking in all my browsers?

Not for your browsers, no. UBlock Origin is far better than any host-based adblocker.

I use pihole to block ads inside apps, it's unmatched for that.

Re: Pi-Hole 4.3.2

#153
post #111

The one thing that's holding me back on actually using Pi-Hole is the lack of flexibility. What I'd really like to see is the ability to do various things on a per-client basis. For example, one commenter wanted a simple "reload without blocking" functionality and the response was to use a bookmarklet plus the Pi-Hole API to disable it temporarily. This works, but the problem is that it disables it temporarily for ev…

I think AdGuard's AdGuard Home, Pi-Hole competitor, does this. I've been following it for a while but haven't had the chance to replace my Pi-Hole installation yet.

I played around with it. I really like the integrated DNS over HTTPS, but the reporting doesn't quite match up. I didn't bother switching but it would be a perfectly usable option.

Re: Pi-Hole 4.3.2

#154
post #15

Just 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…

IME, it really depends on the website. If the user normally has Javascript disabled, then suddenly enables it on a graphical browser while visiting a news website, look out.

Dumpster fire indeed. The user's computer resources are quickly usurped and things slow to a crawl. Users have been trained to be patient I guess, waiting for websites to "load".

Interestingly, I find that many egregiously ad/tracker-laden websites actually "work" well enough without Javascript, meaning the content is readable, sometimes even the images are displayed. For these websites, it does not appear that they are purposely designed to be "unusable" without Javascript enabled. As a text-only browser user, I sometimes perceive some websites "do not work" with Javascript enabled. Trying to view them with the "recommended browser" with Javascript enabled makes the computer so unbearably slow and janky that I give up and go back to turning Javascript off.

Re: Pi-Hole 4.3.2

#155

The one thing that's holding me back on actually using Pi-Hole is the lack of flexibility. What I'd really like to see is the ability to do various things on a per-client basis. For example, one commenter wanted a simple "reload without blocking" functionality and the response was to use a bookmarklet plus the Pi-Hole API to disable it temporarily. This works, but the problem is that it disables it temporarily for ev…

One solution is to set up two separate wireless networks with separate VLANs where one uses the pihole for DNS and the other does not. Clients can temporarily switch to the ads network at will. It might not be possible unless you have a decently high-end router. I know DD-WRT or Ubiquiti Unifi gear can do this.

I did this not more than 2 months ago. Only time I connect to my other network is when I want to access my odroid xu4 on which I accidentally blocked the wrong subnet in iptables.

Re: Pi-Hole 4.3.2

#156
post #53

Openwrt has DNS ad-blocking built in which works just as well as pi-hole. It simply doesn't have the monitoring of what is being blocked but it is rarely needed anyway. https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/ad-blocking

pfSense also has pfBlocker-ng[1] which can also be used for this purpose.

[1] https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/packages/pfblocke...

Re: Pi-Hole 4.3.2

#157
post #49

I 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?

The effort is super low, the most time consuming step is downloading Raspbian and flashing it to the SD card. And _as soon_ as I set it up I noticed how much faster it makes things (I was already running ad blockers).

Re: Pi-Hole 4.3.2

#158
post #10

This might be an alternative for people who are too lazy for setting up a pi-hole or desire things to be a couple of ms faster: https://simplednscrypt.org/

That isn't what I would call a simple solution for lazy people, it requires the user to run a local service and download/setup their own blocklist, with no way to automatically update it.

Adguard DNS is a simple solution for lazy people. Change your DNS server and, well, that's it.

https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html

Re: Pi-Hole 4.3.2

#159
post #137
post #136

I really wish PiHole would support DOH. Currently if you want to have secured DNS you have to set up a DOH local proxy, then connect pihole to that.

Can’t you setup cloudflared on your pi-hole or does it have issues?

That's what I did. Works fine. It would of course be far better if Pihole supported DNS over HTTPS natively.
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