A Fourth Raspberry Pi – Ad Blocking Throughout Home Network

Installed Pi-Hole on an old Raspberry Pi Model B this weekend.

Initially installed using DietPi (which looks awesome, and I intend to play with more soon), but then redid with the official Raspbian Jessie Lite image and the instructions on the Pi-Hole website.

Because of U-Verse’s networking requirements (including the use of AT&T’s DNS servers), DNS changes have to be made individually on each device.  However, this also preserves some flexibility to use different DNS servers for different devices.  I’ve contemplated using OpenDNS to provide additional protections and potentially parental controls, but currently just using the U-Verse router as the ultimate provider of DNS instructions.  This means no speed improvement (other than related to DNS caching and avoidance of downloading of ads), but maximum consistency.

One trick: on iOS, you can indicate a back-up DNS server by entering two or more DNS servers seperated by semi-colons (;).

Based on limited testing, the ad blocking isn’t as robust (or pretty, as it leaves blank spaces for ads) as uBlock Origin, but works across devices and avoids the memory hit caused by running a local ad blocker.


Posted

in

by

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *