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Pi-hole 5.0

pi-hole.net

131–140 of 254 posts

Re: Pi-hole 5.0

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No additional hardware required, you can use it to provide some protection to your family without having to worry about remote access to the Pi-Hole to configure things, works for your devices on the go, cheaper than running pi-hole in the cloud yourself unless. Pricing wise it’s over 2 years worth of service for the price of an original Pi, a good SD card and a case. The only circumstances where Pi Hole is unquestio…

FWIW, pihole is not tied to any particular hardware. For example: https://github.com/pi-hole/docker-pi-hole

Yeah that docker is great! Though it lags behind a bit, it's still on 4.2.2.

Re: Pi-hole 5.0

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Web UI has a Disable button, and also quick options for permanent, 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 5 minutes, custom, etc. I think there's also an API as well. I can toggle it via Alexa and Home-Assistant. It's a feature that's been around for 2 years or more

I just noticed that the home assistant addon has been deprecated: https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-pi-hole . I hope that it comes back eventually.

They recommend the AdGuard Home one now... That's why they have replaced it.

I also don't like it as AdGuard is a commercial company, and I have zero need for the added features like parental control.

But I don't really care, I run all the dockers that have nothing to do with home assistant outside of hassio anyway.

Re: Pi-hole 5.0

#133
post #3

Pi-hole is very easy to set up, and it works so well you can basically forget about it from that point on. Blocking ads is nice, but it’s also a huge boon for privacy. I run uBlock origin on all my browsers, but Pi-hole still blocks 30-50% of requests on my network. It’s also really nice to be able to glance at the logs and get an idea of what’s going on on your network, or if there’s any unusual activity. I’m especi…

I set up a pihole and literally forgot about it. Like I was cleaning out a closet on moving day and found it plugged in. Took a moment to even realise what it was doing there.

Finding a years abandoned Linux server on your home network m ight be a good leasson to always treat your home network as if it was compromised.

Re: Pi-hole 5.0

#134
PSA: A RPi running Pi-hole is not a fire-and-forget item. The networked software on it, including pi-hole, sometimes has security holes discovered and exploited, and has to be kept up to date. See eg https://natedotred.wordpress.com/2020/03/28/cve-2020-8816-pi... & https://www.reddit.com/r/pihole/comments/73tvdq/cve201714491... & https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=... (afaik Pi-hole is built on dnsmasq)

Re: Pi-hole 5.0

#135
post #112

> Much more efficient memory use. This is more impressive than it sounds. My pihole currently uses about 25MB of RAM with over half a million blocked domains and around 20 clients.

I'm curious what lists you're using that gets you to 500k blocked domains?

https://dbl.oisd.nl has about a million. Using it with minimal whitelisting for about a year, works fine

Re: Pi-hole 5.0

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No additional hardware required, you can use it to provide some protection to your family without having to worry about remote access to the Pi-Hole to configure things, works for your devices on the go, cheaper than running pi-hole in the cloud yourself unless. Pricing wise it’s over 2 years worth of service for the price of an original Pi, a good SD card and a case. The only circumstances where Pi Hole is unquestio…

Interesting, thanks! I've been thinking about running a Pi-hole at home and redirecting all my phone traffic through it via WireGuard.

I do exactly that, though I run my VPN in the cloud (a scaleway instance which is only 3 euro per month). Using algo for the vpn: https://github.com/trailofbits/algo . I can highly recommend it! Though I had some issues with play store updates being blocked but that's resolved now. Unfortunately google play services are essentially one big spyware collection so it makes sense for it to block them.

I also had to manually provision my Android phone on IKEv2 (ipsec), Algo used to provide a strongswan config but unfortunately they dropped this in favour of wireguard. But you can still set it up manually (and on Samsung devices you don't even need strongswan). Wireguard is faster, yes, but my work blocks pretty much every port they don't know, except IKEv2/ipsec because many contractors use it to connect to their work :)

Re: Pi-hole 5.0

#137
I just realised that if your router runs OpenWrt, you can install PiHole (an equivalent of, rather) directly onto your router by installing the following packages [1]

    dnsmasq
    adblock
    luci-app-adblock
You may also need

    libustream-mbedtls
Just tried it, works great. With a few small lists, the amount of blocked DNS requests is floating at around 30%.

[1]: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/ad-blocking

Re: Pi-hole 5.0

#138
I run my pihole within LXD on my home server, found it much easier than to maintain another device. Also much more responsive.

Re: Pi-hole 5.0

#139
post #43
post #38

I have never used this but how does it block ads on https pages? Or am I misunderstanding pi-hole?

Browsing sites served over HTTPS still requires querying a DNS server to figure out what IP address to connect to. Pi-hole acts as a DNS server and returns invalid results when asked for the IP of a blocked site. Ads are served from a separate domain from content, so they can be blocked without affecting the content.

Oh great point. Thanks for the explanation.

Re: Pi-hole 5.0

#140
I prefer blocking ads by browser extension for PC/iOS and device local MiTM solution (like AdGuard) for Android because these solutions can block more precisely and easier to unblock things permanently or temporary, compared to DNS server solution like Pi-hole or NextDNS. Why choose DNS solution? I suspect the reasons are maybe like for lower resource usage (especially for smartphones), works for smart device like TV.
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