Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

cri.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 163 posts

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#131

Post by fragmede »

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…

RFC 7871 specifies ECS, in which the DNS forwards the client's subnet to the upstream DNS server in order for CDNs to continue to be useful.

I have no idea if the Pi-hole is configured with this extension.

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#132

Post by 0x49d1 »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #117

I actually use NextDNS now, it's been on HN before and got good comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22854209

Very nice resolver: I've pi-hole at home, but NextDNS as DNS resolver on mobile and as alternative DNS provider on home router. The setup works well, the only real thing the browser's adblocker is still needed is YouTube ads ;) Sure will pay for NextDNS when they will be out of beta.

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#133

Post by Havoc »

christian_fei wrote: post #19
Havoc wrote: post #6

There are dockerised versions as well if you happen to have a docker stack somewhere in your home

i like the pi-hole installer a lot, since it's a damn one-liner. i was amazed by its simplicity

Yeah definitely easier to deploy on a raspberry than docker but means an extra device

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#134

Post by dhimes »

gurrone wrote: post #121

I find it amazing how often ad blocking is discussed here, and start to wonder how many peeps hanging out here on the other hand depend indirectly on ad revenue to pay bills? There are obviously the big corps Facebook and Google, but also my own small employer, which is in theory in a different biz, runs ads on the web shop as an additional income source (which I find not very clever, increases page load times and is…

As always, it's not the ads most of us object to- it's the trackers. Google's original idea for monetizing the web, that you would be interested in something related to what you were searching for, apparently failed and now everybody's trying to follow you around to see what you might be interested in purchasing.

It needs to stop.

I know it's a lame solution but I use ff and containers and have a "shopping" container for sites that I don't block trackers on. I also have various other containers for other sites I don't mind knowing about each other. But mostly I block them.

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#135

Post by christian_fei »

Havoc wrote: post #133
christian_fei wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i like the pi-hole installer a lot, since it's a damn one-liner. i was amazed by its simplicity

Yeah definitely easier to deploy on a raspberry than docker but means an extra device

True

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#136

Post by strenholme »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #129
strenholme wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually tried that with MaraDNS in the pre-1.0 days (in case of collision, go forward in hash array N elements until there is no collision). The problem is that it works really great for static data, but doesn’t work for dynamic data as cleanly as using a linked list to handle collisions. The one thing I would do differently is that Deadwood (MaraDNS’s recursive/blacklist DNS server) adds individual elements with…

But the data is fairly static isn't it? You're not constantly updating the blacklists?

We’re using the same hash to both store blacklist data and cache dynamic DNS data. Yes, we could put the blacklist in a separate data structure, but doing it this way made adding blacklist support a one-day instead of a two-month (shorter, if I use something like sqlite) project.

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#137

Post by bluntfang »

gurrone wrote: post #121

I find it amazing how often ad blocking is discussed here, and start to wonder how many peeps hanging out here on the other hand depend indirectly on ad revenue to pay bills? There are obviously the big corps Facebook and Google, but also my own small employer, which is in theory in a different biz, runs ads on the web shop as an additional income source (which I find not very clever, increases page load times and is…

You'll be sad to learn that most of wealth is created by taking advantage of people. Most of us agree that advertising is annoying at best and most of us work for companies that make their money from it. Most of the people in this category are knowledgable (see: privileged) enough to stop receiving advertisements.

Learning how to do this is not "hard" per se, but if you haven't had your own computer growing up and been born into an environment that encourages learning, you aren't going to be able to do this.

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#138

Post by bluntfang »

dhimes wrote: post #134
gurrone wrote: post #121

I find it amazing how often ad blocking is discussed here, and start to wonder how many peeps hanging out here on the other hand depend indirectly on ad revenue to pay bills? There are obviously the big corps Facebook and Google, but also my own small employer, which is in theory in a different biz, runs ads on the web shop as an additional income source (which I find not very clever, increases page load times and is…

As always, it's not the ads most of us object to- it's the trackers. Google's original idea for monetizing the web, that you would be interested in something related to what you were searching for, apparently failed and now everybody's trying to follow you around to see what you might be interested in purchasing. It needs to stop. I know it's a lame solution but I use ff and containers and have a "shopping" container…

>it's not the ads most of us object to

I would love to see real data on this! Most of my peers don't want to be marketed to, at least when it comes to internet advertising. Definitely when it comes to traditional advertising (ie billboards are an eyesore, TV ads are offensive or irrelevant or just plain annoying).

Re: Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

#139

Post by strenholme »

x3blah wrote: post #128
strenholme wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MaraDNS (OK, Deadwood) can handle white lists too: upstream_servers = {} upstream_servers["."] = "192.168.253.253" # Never answers upstream_servers["good-domain.example.com."] = "9.9.9.9" upstream_servers["whitelist-entry.foo."] = "9.9.9.9" # And so on The downside is that the code currently only supports 20,000 elements added this way.

I am a djbdns user. I also use nsd and unbound. I do not use "upstream" third party DNS, such as 9.9.9.9. Surprised to hear that anyone still uses MaraDNS. What I am curious about are these massive blocklists. Does anyone actually read through them. Does it make sense to block 60,000 hosts when only, say 100 or even 1000, ever stand a chance of being accessed by a user's computer -- due to the user's particular usage…

In my experience, using an upstream server is faster and more reliable than having a DNS server on a home network recursively solve the name. That said, MaraDNS/Deadwood does have full recursion support, which resolves correctly over 99.9% of domains, but there is that .1% or less of misconfigured domains which only resolve when a recursive DNS server is bug-for-bug identical to BIND.

NSD/Unbound are good DNS servers, as is the newer Knot DNS suite.

djbdns was really good in the early 2000s, but hasn’t been updated since 2001 and its age is starting to show. Yes, there are third party patches, but forks of the djbdns codebase have this annoying way of getting abandoned after a couple of years. I’ll probably end up doing basic maintenance of a djbdns fork just so there’s something getting minimal maintenance available to download.

Post reply on HN