I haven't moved mine off of the Pi personally, but I've read positive reports of people using Digital Ocean or similar to host PI-Hole. That could also, in theory, allow it to be used while remote or for mobile devices.
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Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements
211–220 of 262 posts
Re: Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not much effort. You basically write an image to an SD card, put it into a pi and you're up and running. Although it doesn't block everything that ubo does, it does a darn good job and it's also effective for devices where ubo isn't an option. It updates the list on its own. I occasionally update it when I happen to log in to check something and I notice the software is out of date. I don't think it's a situatio…
What is "ubo"?
uBlock Origin
Re: Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
They didn't say whitelist ad providers, they said sites. Which you can do with pi-hole.
How does a DNS blocker know what requests are caused by what site? It's a stateless protocol.
Yeah, that was a misunderstanding on my part.
I suppose for their whitelist/blacklist to work with regex matching the ads would have to be served from a similarly named domain. Like facebook.com vs ads.facebook.com, and you'd have to whitelist *facebook.com. And if they were getting ads externally you'd have to whitelist those ads for every site that you visit.
Re: Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements
#214[tinfoilhat] Given that Chrome now became Google's weapon against adblocking, how long until it starts refusing to use Pi-hole specifically? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20044430 [/tinfoilhat]
Conceivably we could take a harder line on this, if we get a little deeper into the routing. We could make it so we only whitelist IP addresses outbound if we saw them come back through our DNS server, and network block everything else. Then if you bypass my DNS server, you don't get to talk to the Internet, unless you directly pick an address that something else has whitelisted that way. I'm thinking about this, and…
Interesting, interesting. Note that long DNS TTLs will break this: your DNS server needs to hand out artificially short TTLs so that clients will keep re-querying (within the local network).
Re: Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not much effort. You basically write an image to an SD card, put it into a pi and you're up and running. Although it doesn't block everything that ubo does, it does a darn good job and it's also effective for devices where ubo isn't an option. It updates the list on its own. I occasionally update it when I happen to log in to check something and I notice the software is out of date. I don't think it's a situatio…
What is "ubo"?
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Re: Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements
#216Also, owners or routers able to run OpenWRT (which is actively maintained and in great shape since the merge with LEDE), you have access to several packages providing the same technical solution (DNS-based blocking). As far as I know, the most common and maintained is https://github.com/openwrt/packages/tree/master/net/adblock/... . Super easy to install, full-featured, lots of lists to pick from, auto-updates lists,…
On similar note there are scripts which will enable host-based ad blocking via DNS for other open source router firmware like DDWRT, Tomato, Asus WRT etc.[1] But I presume Pi-hole has automatic updates to lists, data visualisations, better community support than the routers with open source firmwares which are often quite bug-ridden (not to belittle the effort though). [1]: https://wiki.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Ad_b…
> "data visualisations"
Those visualizations on the pi-hole look great indeed!
> "Pi-hole has automatic updates to lists, [...] better community support than the routers with open source firmwares which are often quite bug-ridden (not to belittle the effort though)."
OpenWRT/adblock auto-updates lists too, and I can't speak for DD-WRT or Tomato, but I've been pleasantly surprised by the support and quality I met using OpenWRT. About support, my few questions got answered quickly on their forum and r/openwrt. On the software quality side, apart from the UI being slow (which seems reasonable, it's running on a cheap router), sometimes complicated by lots of options (but at least they're available, and an effort is usually made to hide the exotic options under an "Advanced" tab), and blandly bootstrap-y, I don't remember hitting any bug.
Re: Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements
#217If you're running some type of hypervisor (ESXi, Proxmox, etc.), you can create a tiny VM running Debian and load Pi-hole on it. No need for extra hardware and wires.
I run mine on exactly that: a Dell R720 sitting on a rack next to my desk from within a Debian 9 virtual machine inside ESXi.
I actually want to do the opposite: transition this to dedicated hardware (like a Pi, but worried about performance) that is a little less noisy. This is shockingly quiet for a 2U but I am a stickler for silence.
Some pix: https://imgur.com/a/0xwcfNN
Re: Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disable my adblocking for sites that use reasonable ads. If I go to a site and am bombarded with pop ups, auto playing video ads, etc., then yeah why wouldn't I block them? With the malware and tracking that is often injected into ads I have no problem using my adblocker at all times and disabling it for pages that ask politely. I'm happy to click on ads on sites that I frequent and would like to support. I think t…
Problem is you don’t know what’s reasonable and what’s not. It’s not based on how it looks. If may look reasonable and harmless but still send your IP and browser fingerprint to surveillance ads networks.
That's true. I suppose there's a certain amount of trust required. I really only ever disable it on sites that have a good track record with security and provide me enough value. There is risk involved though.
Re: Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not much effort. You basically write an image to an SD card, put it into a pi and you're up and running. Although it doesn't block everything that ubo does, it does a darn good job and it's also effective for devices where ubo isn't an option. It updates the list on its own. I occasionally update it when I happen to log in to check something and I notice the software is out of date. I don't think it's a situatio…
What is "ubo"?
uBlock Origin, an ad-blocking add-in for browsers.
Re: Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements
#220Is this available as a Synology package I could install on my Synology NAS?
Not directly but, depending on your Synology model, you can install it via Docker. I've been using it in that fashion and has been extremely stable.