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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

#51

Post by ziml77 »

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 blocks at a DNS level, uBlock blocks down to the page element level. If the ads are coming from the same domain as actual content, a DNS block can't be used since you'd be blocking the content that you're trying to view.

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

#52

Post by anthropodie »

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 works by blocking domains. Few years ago it was like youtube.com served videos and ad.youtube.com (just an example) served ads.

Back then you could simply block ad.youtube.com and there would be no ads but today Google is serving ads via their main domain. You can't block ads unless you block youtube.com.

So now no DNS based adblocker can block YouTube ads. uBlock is the only option which works inside browser only.

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

#53

Post by anthropodie »

0daystock wrote: post #2

Won't be long now until IoT and other crap-ware devices catch on to this trend and start hard-coding DNS servers in code, or worse, using DNS encryption to avoid this sort of routine blocking by end-users. I wonder how people are thinking about solving this problem.

You solve that by not buying such crap-ware. You buy open hardware systems.

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

#54

Post by lousken »

kayson wrote: post #15

While the interface may not be as pretty, you can do the same thing if you're running pfsense using the pfblocker-ng package: https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/packages/pfblocke... You can also so geo-based IP blocking Combined with pfsense's recursive resolved (unbound), it makes for a pretty great home dns setup.

i am considering pfsense for my homelab setup - can you easily troubleshoot issues and whitelist addresses if you need to?

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

#55

Post by dspillett »

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?

> What is the advantage of this in this case?

Not specific to PiHole, but perhaps keeping the OPs infrastructure management consistent may have monitoring and maintenance benefits.

And specifically mentioned in the very next sentence:

> The Pi Hole project already has a nice Docker project utilizing compose.

It is a supported configuration for PiHole so it fits in nicely, no need to even product their own docker based solution.

Not much of a docker user myself (I've tinkered, and we use it for some things in DayJob, but for my own stuff I use VMs or occasionally LCX if I do want a container instead), but the answer to your questions was really quite obvious.

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

#56

Post by ghostpepper »

anthropodie wrote: post #53
0daystock wrote: post #2

Won't be long now until IoT and other crap-ware devices catch on to this trend and start hard-coding DNS servers in code, or worse, using DNS encryption to avoid this sort of routine blocking by end-users. I wonder how people are thinking about solving this problem.

You solve that by not buying such crap-ware. You buy open hardware systems.

I would love if there was an open 4K HDR TV but I think only a very niche audience actually cares about this so most manufacturers will not see a market opportunity

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

#57

Post by asdkhadsj »

ferminaut wrote: post #29

I know some folks are anti Ubiquiti Unifi on here, but you can run pihole (along with a bunch of other stuff) right on a UDM/UDM-Pro. IMO it makes the most sense to run this on the router, and you can run it in a docker container. If you're looking for a fun hour or two project, check out: https://github.com/boostchicken-dev/udm-utilities/tree/maste...

What sort of cost is associated with pihole, with respect mostly to very latency sensitive things like competitive gaming. Is it problematic?

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

#58

Post by pledg »

moffkalast wrote: post #40
ferminaut wrote: post #29

I know some folks are anti Ubiquiti Unifi on here, but you can run pihole (along with a bunch of other stuff) right on a UDM/UDM-Pro. IMO it makes the most sense to run this on the router, and you can run it in a docker container. If you're looking for a fun hour or two project, check out: https://github.com/boostchicken-dev/udm-utilities/tree/maste...

Ah I just opened this thread to ask why isn't this a standard feature on routers at this point, and lo and behold. I hope it becomes more ubiquitous (hah) even on lower cost ones eventually.

It’s not a standard feature on UniFi either. It’s possible but not part of the OOTB OS.

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

#59

Post by ocdtrekkie »

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?

Any special setup amongst your network takes excess work to maintain. In the case of Pihole, I gave up on maintaining it because I was running it on a Raspberry Pi, and found that it was annoyingly hard to keep a Pi running stable for a long period of time.

Had I a convenient way to set it up in a Docker container, it would've been better. Of course, since I don't run anything in Docker at home, that would also constitute a special setup I have to maintain.

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

#60

Post by more_corn »

asdkhadsj wrote: post #57
ferminaut wrote: post #29

I know some folks are anti Ubiquiti Unifi on here, but you can run pihole (along with a bunch of other stuff) right on a UDM/UDM-Pro. IMO it makes the most sense to run this on the router, and you can run it in a docker container. If you're looking for a fun hour or two project, check out: https://github.com/boostchicken-dev/udm-utilities/tree/maste...

What sort of cost is associated with pihole, with respect mostly to very latency sensitive things like competitive gaming. Is it problematic?

No expected impact. If for some insane reason a game is also calling as servers your performance will be improved.

Consider the case of a web page. The content you want (the news article) consists of say 100 get requests totaling 1mb. The content you don’t want (ads) consists of 120 get requests totaling 1.2mb.

When pihole is in use the content you want does not have to contend with adversarial content. You have half as many requests, there’s 50% less data in the pipe, you get what you wanted faster.

Gaming is not impacted because your games don’t call advertising servers. If they did (for some insane reason) the real game requests get served immediately not having to wait in line behind the ad content.

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