How many times have you encountered annoying ads on sites you browse from your personal computer, mobile phone or smart TV? How much better would it be, instead of installing an ad-blocker mechanism (e.g. plugin) on each device, if you could block all advertising content from the entire network using a single device? All questions can be solved using Pi-Hole.
Pi-Hole is an open source software that acts as an internal DNS server, and aims to block all advertising content from the sites you visit. It can be installed very easily on Raspbian, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and CentOS , while its low computing resource requirements make it ideal for running on a Raspberry Pi. How simple is that? Just install it, connect it to your router and start browsing freely!
Installation on Raspberry Pi
Install Pi-Hole by running the following command in the Raspberry Pi terminal:
curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash
The above command, in summary, will make the following changes to the Raspberry Pi:
- Software upgrade
- Installing web server and dns service and modifying their settings.
- Download a list of all known adware servers from 7 different sites.
Otherwise, if you wish to read the code that you are about to download to your device, you can visit the instructions provided by the Pi-Hole project page.
Configuring network settings
Once you have successfully installed the software on your Raspberry Pi, it is time to configure your router to take full advantage of Pi-Hole's capabilities , and more specifically, to configure your network devices to use Pi-Hole as their DNS server. Alternatively, you can use Pi-Hole's pre-installed DHCP server while you have already disabled DHCP on your router. Finally, if none of the above options are possible, you should configure each device on your network to use Pi-Hole as DNS server .
Using Pi-Hole
If everything went well following the steps above, you can access the Pi-Hole portal from any connected device on the same network using one of the following methods:
- https://<IP_ADDPRESS_OF_YOUR_PI_HOLE> /admin/
- http:/pi.hole/admin (if you configured Pi-Hole to your DNS server)
- https://pi.hole/ (if you configured Pi-Hole to your DNS server)
