Pinhole is still a thing. If you want other options there is also adguard.
I use Blocky. I switched from PiHole because I didn’t have need for all the features (DHCP, Dashboard) and honestly it was a slow day and I had nothing better to do.
Pi-hole and AdGuard home are both good. It kind of comes down to which UI you like better.
Yeah do it there is basically no downside. I agree with others that you may have trouble with the ads in streaming services. On my android TV, YouTube ads, for instance, aren't blocked by pihole.
Safing.io Portmaster
I felt the same way about youtube, streaming, shopping and general browsing: too many ads. Ruins the content. I set up a pi-hole as an experiment to see if it would do what it said and what others said about it. Manage your expectations here. Pi-hole works well for blocking a lot of static information and ads in your browser and a lot of apps on iOS and Android. It does not block video ads on Youtube or Hulu, it does not block ads for Roku or Firestick or Smart TV apps for example, it just does not work because of the technical limitations of how the PiHole software is designed. Using a regular PC with adblock browser extension installed as well gets rid of 99% of ads including video ads from adcdns. PiHole is incredibly easy to setup and install, the pay off in quality of life is enormous. I cannot recommend it more to someone that has a little networking knowledge base. If you can figure out how to port forward and run a handful of command lines you can complete a pihole setup in an hour.
Why would you want to port forward your dns?
Sorry, you wouldnt and didnt mean to imply that. I was suggesting that port forwarding is a fairly easy task and if one is confident in their ability to do that, than they should be able to complete a PiHole install.
Pihole is great for blocking on things that you can't install a local adblocker on. It does have downsides though, it can be annoying and block things you don't want it to. It might not block ads well on your tv or might impair the functionality in weird ways. It can depend lot on which lists you add, but there are many available and they are usually quite well documented about their intentions.
NextDNS is awesome if you want the simple solution, and don't have any hardware to install services on. Thee free version is somehwta limited to queries(300k per month), but personally didn't hit those when I was using the free tier.
NextDNS has a lot of nice customization and can easily had custom block lists. The pro version is 2euros a month I believe. I personally stick with NextDNS due to never having to worry about updating the service and it always just works. I also have it hooked to my Tailnet, that way all my devices use it by default.
But ofc, Pihole, Adguard and the rest are also awesome. Best to just pick one that looks good for you. The end goal here is to just have something running in the background rather than nothing.
I went with a pi running pi-hole. I got it as a project where the tool is the project. But, it's essential infrastructure now and I don't want to mess with it incase I break it. I'm an idiot with a poor history with pi guides so far, so I will break it. It's running the adblock fine, I assume it's doing the tracking and malware blocking fine too.
Sadly, that's where I leave the project for now, I had intended to give it a HDD and some... other... software but I really don't want to break it. I tried convincing the better half that I obviously need to N+1 but she wisely did not see reason.
If you want to try setting it up in high availability with failover, give me a poke. And until then - go to Teleporter in the settings, and download the backup. You can restore from there.
One thing worth saying is this - you can grab a cheap refurbished ssd (the smaller - the better), check it's SMART data for any red flags, and attach it to the pi as OS disk. It will be much more reliable than SD, but overkill if you only run pi on the box. Alternatively look into log2ram, it keeps your SD card alive for longer :D but backup first!
Thanks. I already have Log2Ram running to prolong the life of the SD. My planned disaster relief is a spare SD, already set up and taped to the box ready to swap and reboot in case of emergency. SD cards are cheap so chucking <£10 at the setup once in a while is no big thing. A fresh install on the new SD allows me to improve on what I've already done, for example the new SD I'll run DietOS instead of Raspbian, and reinforce skills. Less time efficient but that's no matter when the box is working and it's a hobby. I can then keep the old SD card taped inside the case as a physical back up. Perhaps more expensive in the long run, but an SD card taped to the inside of the case with simple instructions is an easy sell to the fiancée.
My experience with guides has shaken my confidence quite a bit. Which is fine, I'll get over myself and the point is to learn, so me hitting snags is a good thing. But, until I have a functioning back up I'm not going to be fucking with it. Facebook cannot go down on account of my education.
But if I may, I have one question, a bunch of recommendations have the setup "segregated" (I dunno the word) in Docker and Portainers but I don't understand the rationale. I wasn't intending on doing this, instead opting to install Pi-hole, Log2Ram, UFW, and the... other... softwares directly to the OS for simplicity. Why would one set up a Pi-hole et al in a containers instead of directly?
My current set up is Raspbian OS running Pi-hole as ad, tracker, malware block and DHCP (the ISP router is a Sky2 box so no IP or DNS customisation), Log2Ram and UncomplicatedFireWall.
I wasn’t intending on doing this, instead opting to install Pi-hole, Log2Ram, UFW, and the… other… softwares directly to the OS for simplicity. Why would one set up a Pi-hole et al in a containers instead of directly?
So there are many reasons, and this is something I nowadays almost always do. But keep in mind that some of us have used Docker for our applications at work for over half a decade now. Some of these points might be relevant to you, others might seem or be unimportant.
Basically I have a very simple host setup with only a few packages installed. Then I would remotely configure and start up my containers, expose ports etc. And I can cleanly define where my configuration is, back up only that particular folder for example and keep the rest of the setup easy to redeploy.
I have nothing to add, and an upvote isn't enough. Truly, thank you for your time, there's a lot to think about.
I think for this initial iteration I'm going to direct install in the name of keeping it simple. Next go around I'll try containerising, just to learn if nothing else. If I out-grow the Pi4 they'll be good skills to have.
If someone really wants this service but do not want to (or cannot) host it themself, https://ovpn.com offer this in their client. I used to have a pi-hole selfhosted but not anymore. Using their client on my phone as well solved the problem with blocking ads while not at home.
I actually had a lot of fun a couple years ago deploying PiHole on one of my RaspberryPi’s and routing all my household machines through it. It worked great UNTIL.. my kid was turning in empty homework on Google Classroom and his teachers were getting up him about it. We chastised him thinking it was his fault until I finally discovered that Pihole was messing up his uploads to GC and literally causing this problem. I got super angry with it and walked away without even trying to troubleshoot. Had to profusely apologise not only to his teachers but to him.
You should definitely set up pihole but I don't think it'll block ads on streaming apps unless I'm wrong and someone can point me to something that explains how I can set that up.
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!