I am running Pi-Hole like system assembled myself. OpenVPN, Tor, dnscrypt-proxy[3] and dnsmasq[2] plus large lists of blocks from Steven Black hosts project[1] and firehole.

I am running this for four years now in different incarnations and it is generally smooth. It was also quite educational to assemble.

[1] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

[2] [3] dnsmasq isn't necessary as dnscypt-proxy is now able to block domains and IPs and of caching requests. I am using dnsmasq mostly for dhcp and to spread traffic among two dnscrypt-proxy clients and Google DNS.

Hey CryptoAUSTRALIA is here. We are answering questions in the next hour or so. Proof: https://twitter.com/CryptoAustralia/status/92598468889577062...

PiHole is a fantastic system and works really well.

The only issue I have is its installer works on a bare system. I prefer to use the Pi as a multi purpose system: for home-assistent, as unifi controller and for pi-hole. It will costs you some time to get it running with all the pi-hole features (auto update and so on) operational.

Or you just use a very basic dnsmasq installation and make use of a list like: https://github.com/notracking/hosts-blocklists that allows you to also block full domains.

Been using this list for several months now without any issues.

Besides that, it's worth reading in to dnsmasq's configuration in more detail, in the end pi-hole is just a preconfigured dnsmasq installation with a user interface to manage hostname based blocklists.

If you are running LEDE on a modern router, it's easier to install and use simple-adblock.

https://github.com/stangri/openwrt-packages/blob/simple-adbl...

I ran Pi-Hole for a few weeks, and found it was more trouble than it it was worth. Because it blocks at the DNS level using (very large) DNS blacklists. It was cumbersome to temporarily whitelist domains when you hit a site that just wouldn't load properly as you had no idea which of the many domains that site was requesting were being blocked. By comparison, using an in-browser adblocker you can just disable the the adblocker and reload the page, and once done, a single click re-enables the adblocker again. Also, Pi-Hole used to be undetectable by anti-adblocker scripts, but now it isn't.

Although very good at what it does (almost too good in fact) it is a blunt instrument that may or may not suit your needs.

I use a Pi pretty much exclusively for this purpose and it works very well. Fairly transparent to me in terms of performance (DNS doesn't feel slower at least to me). Glad to see ads blocked across the network, including on mobile devices (including in-app ads). Easy admin panel for whitelisting/blacklisting/updating and you can also do that via command line too

Desktops are easier to deal with, but I installed Pi-hole with the hope of solving the issue on my Android phone. I've had it running for some months now and while it works it's certainly not a perfect solution. Even with it running, YouTube ads still run rampant. For me, video ads and especially YouTube ads are the most intrusive and annoying.

This looks good and something that I might set up soon. But why is it called "pi-hole"? Is it specific to Raspberry Pi in any way? I'm not going to run it on a RPi because I have other machines online anyway, so is there something better that I can use for this purpose?

used a pi-hole for a while. It was great!

then one day power went out, and my sd was corrupted.

(I know, I should have had a backup. I want the internetz to work when I return home in the evening, not to flash-try-format-reinstalldebian etc)

btw, I tried using pihole on a VPS and everything was perfect

Make sure your router is set up with a secondary DNS server if you do this. I made that mistake and took my server (which is where I host this) down for maintenance while everyone was home. I could NOT get into my router config fast enough!

I wonder if as people get on the NBN (ill-fated fibre (now copper) broadband project) whether the Pi will be a bottleneck. I can download at ~90 megabit on a good day - that's about 3 times faster than my Pi 3 can handle.

> but we’ll be focusing on getting it working on a small, ARM-based computing device called a Raspberry Pi (RPi), which costs about $100.

?? do rpi's cost an absurd amount in australia or something?

Is it possible to run it on a VPS somewhere and make Android points its DNS setting to it? There are lots of stupid ad in the apps that can use some blocking.

Pi-Hole is awesome. It took not much effort to get it running on a small default Debian 9 vm. The project is well supported as well. The devs are very responsive on reddit.

Once a client asked if it were possible to block all internet ads in their infrastructure. 20 minutes later i had a pi-hole up and running quite well.

I would like a better chronometer script though :)

Are there any writeups on MITM SSL (installing custom trusted root), ideally showing how to whitelist parts of YouTube?

How does such a system deal with TLS?

"we’ll be focusing on getting it working on a small, ARM-based computing device called a Raspberry Pi (RPi), which costs about $100" holy fuck that made me laugh I realize it might australian but it came off to me as satire haha.

I'm wondering if one day we can have a device between the computer and the monitor that eliminates ads based pixels only.

The advantage is that you can eliminate any ad, also if it is embedded in the content, and not served from an ad-server.

What do you do when you need to look at ads, or you have false positive?

Does it matter which Pi you run it on? I'm slightly concerned about slowing things down.

I ran an ad blocker on my router, simpler and cheaper

You meant to write "no more cumbersome" right?

>generally to ship anything out here costs a lot without the economies of scale.

I've been getting trinkets shipped here from AliExpress for nothing - I'm not sure it's economies of scale.