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Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

brianchristner.io

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Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#41

Post by newscracker »

prometheus1909 wrote: post #35

I keep seeing posts about Pi Holes and it looks good, but I have previously dealt with ads by appending their delivering sites to my /etc/hosts, i.e. 0.0.0.0 trashsite1.com 0.0.0.0 trashsite2.com The only downside I see is that my approach is not network-wide. Any other reasons I should reconsider?

I don’t know how you maintain your hosts list, but with a solution like pi-hole, you can easily subscribe to multiple blocking filters and have them update periodically without any intervention. Of course, you could automate your hosts update too, but pi-hole comes with this built-in.

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#43

Post by pcl »

prometheus1909 wrote: post #35

I keep seeing posts about Pi Holes and it looks good, but I have previously dealt with ads by appending their delivering sites to my /etc/hosts, i.e. 0.0.0.0 trashsite1.com 0.0.0.0 trashsite2.com The only downside I see is that my approach is not network-wide. Any other reasons I should reconsider?

Probably the biggest two selling points are the crowdsourced deny list and the fact that all types of devices will benefit, including "smart" TVs etc.

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#44

Post by otachack »

prometheus1909 wrote: post #35

I keep seeing posts about Pi Holes and it looks good, but I have previously dealt with ads by appending their delivering sites to my /etc/hosts, i.e. 0.0.0.0 trashsite1.com 0.0.0.0 trashsite2.com The only downside I see is that my approach is not network-wide. Any other reasons I should reconsider?

Like you said, convenience of propagating the blockage to all devices, a central place for configuration, stats/diagnostics built into PiHole dashboard. I do like your DIY approach, though!

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#45

Post by user3939382 »

newscracker wrote: post #41
prometheus1909 wrote: post #35

I keep seeing posts about Pi Holes and it looks good, but I have previously dealt with ads by appending their delivering sites to my /etc/hosts, i.e. 0.0.0.0 trashsite1.com 0.0.0.0 trashsite2.com The only downside I see is that my approach is not network-wide. Any other reasons I should reconsider?

I don’t know how you maintain your hosts list, but with a solution like pi-hole, you can easily subscribe to multiple blocking filters and have them update periodically without any intervention. Of course, you could automate your hosts update too, but pi-hole comes with this built-in.

There’s an app for macOS called Gas Mask that helps you manage these lists easily

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#46

Post by godelski »

Every time I've tried pihole it has failed on services like YouTube. Can someone explain this to me and how I solve it? I know it's not just me, it even happened to Linus Tech Tips but I constantly hear responses "works for me" which are unhelpful. If ublock works fine, why can't pihole? I'm actually interested in a technical answer.

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#47

Post by NegativeLatency »

jrmg wrote: post #18

Like any other project I run everything in a Docker container, and this project should be no different. What is the advantage of this in this case?

Specifically relating to pihole (as of previous versions) it wasn’t the cleanest install uninstall experience and left a bunch of crap behind on my system.

I now run it in a docker container because of this, but I can’t speak to OPs motivations

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#48

Post by jasode »

prometheus1909 wrote: post #35

I keep seeing posts about Pi Holes and it looks good, but I have previously dealt with ads by appending their delivering sites to my /etc/hosts, i.e. 0.0.0.0 trashsite1.com 0.0.0.0 trashsite2.com The only downside I see is that my approach is not network-wide. Any other reasons I should reconsider?

A big limitation with /etc/hosts is no support for wildcards.

Previous subthread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22535387

(But it doesn't look like wildcard pattern matching doesn't work for the substring middle part of the string like your example.)

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#50

Post by datfrojo »

godelski wrote: post #46

Every time I've tried pihole it has failed on services like YouTube. Can someone explain this to me and how I solve it? I know it's not just me, it even happened to Linus Tech Tips but I constantly hear responses "works for me" which are unhelpful. If ublock works fine, why can't pihole? I'm actually interested in a technical answer.

Pihole only works if ads are served from a distinct domain name from content. This works in most cases but YouTube serves ads and content from the same place so pihole can’t prevent. As uBlock works client side it does not face this limitation
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