I keep seeing this posted here and elsewhere. Is there a simple, easy step-by-step explanation for how to build one of these and how to deploy it on your home network?
I’ve got very limited experience with working with Raspberry Pi.
Step 1) Get a raspberry pi. Step 2) Open terminal and paste: curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash Step 3) Point your DNS to the raspberry pi’s IP address.
I looked into making one a while back and it’s honestly quite complicated if you’re not a techy person. I gave up on it, though I think you can also buy them pre-built for a bit more money so you might look into that.
You absolutely don’t need a pi to run pihole. They have a list of officially supported OSs that can run the software, regardless of the hardware (as long as it meets the insanely low system requirements), and it can also be run in a docker container.
It will block youtube ads if the video is embedded in another website. When I want to find a youtube video on my tv I just search it on DuckDucGo, since watching it there blocks ads and seems to bypass any restrictions they’ve placed on watching videos outside of youtube.
I need to set up a cheap computer and just run the TV as a monitor so I can have all the features I want, including a real browser with ublock. But in the meantime, this fixes the one issue I have with DNS level blocking.
You can get “android on a stick” computers and sideload some de-googled stuff. They plug right into the USB port of some smart tvs. You might be able to hack an Amazon Firestick too.
Pihole for the win
That’s not the same. DNS blocking is great but it can’t block as well as a proper ad blocker.
No, but better then nothing and network wide
I keep seeing this posted here and elsewhere. Is there a simple, easy step-by-step explanation for how to build one of these and how to deploy it on your home network?
I’ve got very limited experience with working with Raspberry Pi.
Step 1) Get a raspberry pi. Step 2) Open terminal and paste: curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash Step 3) Point your DNS to the raspberry pi’s IP address.
https://pi-hole.net/
Interesting. So does it slow down your speeds any that you can tell?
It doesn’t really. I won’t give a whole course on DNS and network stuff, but basically it has zero effect on your download and upload speeds.
DNS is like a phone book. You type Wikipedia.org and DNS translates that to an address like 200.92.36.68
When you download stuff, that’s not going through the Pi at all. So there’s no negative effects.
Your own raspberry pi will probably outperform your ISPs DNS, since it’s on your local network.
Also, just by blocking what it does, pages load a lot less, so they load a lot quicker.
If you don’t want to tinker with a Raspberry Pi, a simpler alternative would be AdGuard DNS
https://adguard-dns.io/en/public-dns.html
(Configure manually -> Routers)
I looked into making one a while back and it’s honestly quite complicated if you’re not a techy person. I gave up on it, though I think you can also buy them pre-built for a bit more money so you might look into that.
You actually need a pi to run pihole, anything that can run docker would do
You absolutely don’t need a pi to run pihole. They have a list of officially supported OSs that can run the software, regardless of the hardware (as long as it meets the insanely low system requirements), and it can also be run in a docker container.
Their Official website has easy to follow step-by-step instructions
I use one too, but it doesn’t block certain things like YouTube’s embedded adverts. Also use uBlock Origin.
It will block youtube ads if the video is embedded in another website. When I want to find a youtube video on my tv I just search it on DuckDucGo, since watching it there blocks ads and seems to bypass any restrictions they’ve placed on watching videos outside of youtube.
I need to set up a cheap computer and just run the TV as a monitor so I can have all the features I want, including a real browser with ublock. But in the meantime, this fixes the one issue I have with DNS level blocking.
You can get “android on a stick” computers and sideload some de-googled stuff. They plug right into the USB port of some smart tvs. You might be able to hack an Amazon Firestick too.