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Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

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Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#111

Post by m45t3r »

Thanks for the article to remember me of the existence of this project. I decided to do a setup in my home network using an old Raspberry Pi 1 that I had. Mainly because the router of my ISP screwed up really hard in its DHCP server, so I decided to disable it and use Pi-hole's one instead.

I tried to make this setup as robust as possible, using OverlayFS [1] so root is read-only unless I remount it (to change configuration or upgrades) and with a watchdog so it can auto-reboot in case my Raspberry Pi is unresponsive. Pretty happy with this setup and it my internet seems more responsible than ever.

[1]: https://yagrebu.net/unix/rpi-overlay.md/wiki/Setting_up_over...

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#112

Post by christian_fei »

m45t3r wrote: post #111

Thanks for the article to remember me of the existence of this project. I decided to do a setup in my home network using an old Raspberry Pi 1 that I had. Mainly because the router of my ISP screwed up really hard in its DHCP server, so I decided to disable it and use Pi-hole's one instead. I tried to make this setup as robust as possible, using OverlayFS [1] so root is read-only unless I remount it (to change config…

Awesome!

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#113

Post by lucasverra »

billyhoffman wrote: post #71
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #21

For my home desktop browser, I just use uBlock Origin to block ads. But for my phone, I set up a PiHole running on an EC2 instance and VPN into it from my phone. Blocks ads in everything, not just my web browser. The VPN is configured to only tunnel DNS lookups, not traffic, so the EC2 bandwidth bill is minimal.

Interesting that DNS look ups go to the Pi-hole in EC2, but the subsequent web requests come from the phone. This effectively nullifies the performance benefit of CDNs. Your phone is where ever it is, but your browser is being instructed to connect to edge servers that are geographically close to the AWS region where Pi-hole instance is running. That said, the massive performance gains of blocking ads and intrusive 3…

I use https://nextdns.io/, that basically does that

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#114

Post by vestrigi »

Blackadderz wrote: post #55

Pi-hole has been excellent. I was able to discover that my Samsung TV was reporting minute by minute updates on what I was watching to a local Australian company. Unplugged it faster than I could swear.

Modern TVs actually reached such low prices because almost all of them are paying for production post purchase with user data. So that's generally a great idea to lock it up with pi-hole or to not even connect it at all and use an external streaming box. I think this already made the round on HN https://phys.org/news/2019-02-tvs-cheap-smart-tv-extra.html

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#115

Post by solstice »

kube-system wrote: post #83
brachi wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading these kind of anecdotes makes me wonder why is this legal or at least opt-in.

My TV made me accept a terms of service agreement on first boot.

That (on its own) doesn't mean that it's legal, I'd imagine. At least in the EU, doesn't GDPR prohibit such non-choices?

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#116

Post by iso947 »

mulmen wrote: post #89
LeoPanthera wrote: post #86

The move of applications such as Firefox to start using DNS-over-https to hardcoded DNS servers will render such user-modified DNS services useless. Firefox can have this feature disabled, but more malicious applications will simply not give you the choice.

It's a tragic move. The DHCP/DNS ecosystem made managing devices dead simple. OTOH I suppose we were foolish to ever think our devices were playing nice. Is there a fix to DNS-over-HTTPS as a network operator? Can you MITM your "own" proprietary devices? What dragons live there?

You can set a canary domain which currently is used

The only other way would be MITM all https traffic and sign with your own certificate, but many iot devices won’t allow you to install a new certificate store.

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#118

Post by close04 »

ptmcc wrote: post #74
Blackadderz wrote: post #55

Pi-hole has been excellent. I was able to discover that my Samsung TV was reporting minute by minute updates on what I was watching to a local Australian company. Unplugged it faster than I could swear.

Same with my Sony Android TV. That thing trying to phone god knows what home made up almost a third of all DNS requests on my home network, even with 2 adults working from home. Since you can't buy dumb TVs anymore, you best leave the "smart" ones offline.

Worth mentioning that this is just the domain resolution, not necessarily the real volume of connections. The reason they try every second sometimes (I have devices that do exactly this, ~86000 attempts every day) is because they keep failing. Assuming they resolve once they stop flooding the Pi-hole and will bundle their connections in fewer, larger chunks. Couldn't say what's in those chunks since they're encrypted but I can make a fair guess.

But the bottom line is that the number of attempts to resolve the DNS doesn't say anything about how egregious the activity is. You could have a device try every second because it wants to send an "I'm alive" message home, or you could have a device attempt DNS resolution once per day and send all the traffic it captured from your network. Don't use that number as an indication of how evil the device is, I'm sure the most egregious malware or crappy IoT will be careful not to flood DNS requests.

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#119

Post by dastx »

ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #44
dastx wrote: post #14

Another alternative is AdGuard Home. They've come a long way since they announced it. I switched to AdGuard Home some 6 months ago and it has been great.

I switched a section of my network over to it a few weeks ago, and I've been having constant random internet issues since, and when I swap back to the Pi-Hole the problems go away. Is there some trickery to getting AdGuard to run stable? I have it running as an Add-On to Home Assitant, so I'm not sure if that's causing the issues, but I get lots of failed DNS queries, slowdowns, etc when going through AdGuard.

Not that I know of. I'm running on a pi3b and never had issues. I suggest raising a GitHub issue, they're usually pretty quick to respond and quick to fix bugs.

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#120

Post by kubav »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #86

The move of applications such as Firefox to start using DNS-over-https to hardcoded DNS servers will render such user-modified DNS services useless. Firefox can have this feature disabled, but more malicious applications will simply not give you the choice.

You can disable it on your DNS server using canary domain [1]. Last time I checked it was already implemented in Pi-hole.

1) https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/canary-domain-use-appli...

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