My experience with setting up Pi-hole
30 May, 2023
I forget how I learned about Pi-hole, but I recently set one up on my home network. Basically what Pi-Hole does is block ads at a network-wide level. Any device that gets connected to your network (like WiFi) has ads blocked.
The way it goes about blocking ads is by making all queries go through Pi-Hole as a DNS server. If you aren't tech savvy, this basically means it blocks URLs that are known to be ads. You're probably wondering how Pi-Hole knows which URL is an ad, and which is the actual website you want to visit. Well it does this by having a master list of known URLs. On top of that, you can add whatever URLs you want as you come across ads. You could also use it to block certain websites on your network if you wanted.
There are a few limitations however. For example Youtube video ads. These come from the Youtube URL itself, so it's hard to block them. I did find a list that someone who's totally awesome made, and I added that to my Pi-Hole block list. I haven't watched Youtube enough to know if this list works at all, since I literally just set this all up today, but I'll update the post with the results.
Anyways here's my journey with Pi-Hole. Originally I wanted to do this project on a Raspberry Pi, which is a VERY small computer. The issue with this is that there's a giant shortage of them so they are very hard to get. Luckily, Pi-Hole works on many different operating systems.
I ended up getting a Libre Computer called Le Potato. I'm not kidding. That's what it's called. Freaking amazing name right? Along with that I bought a case for a Raspberry Pi 2/3 B/B+ that fit really well with this little PC. The only thing is that it blocks the IR reader on the PC, but I wasn't going to be using that anyways. The next thing I bought was a microusb power supply. Literally nothing fancy. Then I had a 32gb microSD card laying around that I used for storage.
When all that stuff came, I put the PC in the case and booted it up. I figured at least I would get a post into BIOS, but nothing happened. Now I've installed operating systems before, but I never had to flash something to install an OS. I always just had a USB with Windows already on it or something. I found out that you can't boot this PC with a USB, which was fine because of the SD card.
So I went on a journey of installing an image file without extracting it, writing it to the SD card, or verifying the install. Please don't cringe lol. Anyways, I figured out what I was doing wrong, and used 7zip and WinDisk32 Imager to get an image of Ubuntu installed. I picked Ubuntu because I have experience with that OS from my professional certificate.
After this, I booted the PC and got into the OS. I was just so happy at this point. I didn't want to do anything else for a while. I would say a week or two later, aka today, that's when I decided to try and install Pi-Hole on it.
I ran the command found on the Pi-Hole website, and it said everything was working. Ok cool right? Nah because I tried to access the admin page immediately but that's not how it works either lol. I had to go into my router settings and make sure that the static IP of the Pi-Hole was set as the DNS server. After doing this, I was able to login to the admin page of my Pi-Hole.
I then visited websites on my phone with ads, like news sites, AND IT BLOCKED ALL THE ADS. I was literally in shock that I got this right. I know it sounds super simple to set up, but gosh dang I didn't know what I was doing and I feel really accomplished. I even set up a VPN and let my bf connect to it, and he even had ads blocked on his phone at work.
This has just been the coolest little PC project ever. I'm going to link the Pi-Hole website if anyone else wants to give this a go.
* UPDATE 09/01/23* I've been super busy so I haven't updated this post or blog in forever but I wanted to give an update about YouTube ads. So basically, on PC or a web browser on a phone, the ads are blocked. On things such as the YouTube app, Roku, or Xbox there are still ads.
This is because in order to block ads there, you would have to block the domain which would make YouTube also blocked.
-Parker-