PiHole should be a must

Found error in my case, inside the router, Google's DNS (8.8.8.8) was set as Secondary DNS. Removed it and rebooted the router, and it's working better now. But m facing a new problem, I'm unable to update my Pihole as it says No more space on Disk. My Pi is still running off of a 16 GB SD card. How can I clean it up? There is no bloatware, and have removed a lot of apps already.
 
LaatSahab said:
Found error in my case, inside the router, Google's DNS (8.8.8.8) was set as Secondary DNS. Removed it and rebooted the router, and it's working better now. But m facing a new problem, I'm unable to update my Pihole as it says No more space on Disk. My Pi is still running off of a 16 GB SD card. How can I clean it up? There is no bloatware, and have removed a lot of apps already.
Click to expand...
Try clearing the pihole logs if you don't need them
 
bigbyte said:
However, Fresh Tomato says that Adblock doens't work with DoH (DNS over https) and other Encrypted DNS lookups. Could that be an issue?
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This is true. I have enabled DNS over HTTPS and my Firefox and Chrome DNS queries never get logged in my Pi-hole. I wanted to add DoH support for my Pi-hole but then I don't know how to manually change Firefox's DoH, and it would become messy with bare metal installs, I should have dockerized it, but it's running on a Pi Zero W (which I got for 1.3k during this time of global chip shortage), so can't complain.
 
Well with Fresh tomato you can get both DOH / DOT and adblock, only thing is encryption shall be from router and not from the source computer/device.
 
Have always wanted to setup a pi-hole but have been concerned about latency / speed deteriorating and having something unnecessarily blocked

Also is a pi zero W enough or would getting a more powerful one make any difference in performance (just for the pi-hole)
 
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ryu_88 said:
Have always wanted to setup a pi-hole but have been concerned about latency / speed deteriorating and having something unnecessarily blocked

Also is a pi zero W enough or would getting a more powerful one make any difference in performance (just for the pi-hole)
Click to expand...
Would suggest reading up their documentation and FAQs
discourse.pi-hole.net

What model Raspberry Pi should I use for Pi-hole?

Pi-hole has low resource requirements and can even run over wireless. All model Raspberry Pi's will work for Pi-hole: Zero Zero W 1B 1B+ 2B 2B+ 3B 3B+ but don't take our word for it: https://www.reddit.com/r/pihole/comments/8g36cc/whats_the_goto_model_for_pihole/...
discourse.pi-hole.net discourse.pi-hole.net
 
ryu_88 said:
Have always wanted to setup a pi-hole but have been concerned about latency / speed deteriorating and having something unnecessarily blocked
Click to expand...
Pi-hole is just a DNS server and has nothing to do with actual internet data transfer or routing so it cannot affect your usual internet speeds at all.

Yes, you might think of it in that way because the very first query for a domain name will go to pi-hole for parsing and filtering but consider it this way that if until now it used to go to a third-party server which obviously would take a few milliseconds to respond, after letting pi-hole do that job on your local network it would be much much faster since now it doesn't have to leave your local network (if you use it with unbound) else even if you set upstream DNS on pi-hole it will be the same because ping/response time in local network is <1ms and to reach the third-party DNS it would be still the same what you had earlier.

As for getting something unnecessarily blocked. you'd have to try yourself. Don't use too many lists from a lot of places so you won't find this an issue. So there's nothing to worry about.

1647147533347.png


I have the above setup and have no issues across 15+ devices used for all kinds of stuff. I do have a whitelist of 200+ address but I added only around 10+ domains to an already curated whitelist.
 
enthusiast29 said:
Pi-hole is just a DNS server and has nothing to do with actual internet data transfer or routing so it cannot affect your usual internet speeds at all.

Yes, you might think of it in that way because the very first query for a domain name will go to pi-hole for parsing and filtering but consider it this way that if until now it used to go to a third-party server which obviously would take a few milliseconds to respond, after letting pi-hole do that job on your local network it would be much much faster since now it doesn't have to leave your local network (if you use it with unbound) else even if you set upstream DNS on pi-hole it will be the same because ping/response time in local network is <1ms and to reach the third-party DNS it would be still the same what you had earlier.

As for getting something unnecessarily blocked. you'd have to try yourself. Don't use too many lists from a lot of places so you won't find this an issue. So there's nothing to worry about.

View attachment 129093

I have the above setup and have no issues across 15+ devices used for all kinds of stuff. I do have a whitelist of 200+ address but I added only around 10+ domains to an already curated whitelist.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the detailed answer, definitely helps a lot in understanding how it works. Hopefully a pi-hole can block the multitude of ads that Samsung pushes onto my TV (just got a samsung tv a couple months back and was super disappointed, did change the default settings to stop ads but there are always a few ads that samsung pushes to the main TV menu which cannot be disabled, and they are a HUGE pain

Don't understand why Samsung thinks of their TV's as just advertising tools. The situation is so bad that I have to face three - four ads just in the menu before being able to choose what I want to watch

Will definitely try out the pi-hole and update on the results
 
ryu_88 said:
Have always wanted to setup a pi-hole but have been concerned about latency / speed deteriorating and having something unnecessarily blocked

Also is a pi zero W enough or would getting a more powerful one make any difference in performance (just for the pi-hole)
Click to expand...
Pi Hole takes time only for new/first time DNS requests.

After that, it caches them and serves them locally instead of every request going to an internet DNS server (like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8).
Cached requests take <1ms to be served.

Websites respond faster(imagine every DNS request taking 50ms, do a ping to those DNS servers) plus you have a network wide ad block. Block ads on smart tvs and mobile app ads also.

Regarding unnecessary blocking, stick to default block lists. That is unlikely to break anything. After that you can add more expansive blocklists, you can black/whitelist individual domains also later.
 
babhishek said:
honestly, its good however a pi is not doing anything much you can do with a very powerful router with ad block, plus some always on vpns on devices. pi is great for home wifi, same devices on 4g will be hit the moment you switch over from wifi to mobile data.
Click to expand...
I have noticed in later versions, that android will use google dns and not care two hoots about pihole or adblock for that matter. We can (force) use of pihole for entire network by using a NAT redirect from firewall/router or as i discovered it works better with pihole+stubby+next dns and so called **private dns** settings in android.. Benifit is that the android phone benefits from the blocking even when I am **not** connected to my wifi and using ISP/4G. Stubby ensures all (upstream) DNS queries are encrypypted. I do agree we could also do this with adblock+stubby+openwrt, provided the router has sufficent memory and cpu.
 
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enthusiast29 said:
Pi-hole is just a DNS server and has nothing to do with actual internet data transfer or routing so it cannot affect your usual internet speeds at all.

Yes, you might think of it in that way because the very first query for a domain name will go to pi-hole for parsing and filtering but consider it this way that if until now it used to go to a third-party server which obviously would take a few milliseconds to respond, after letting pi-hole do that job on your local network it would be much much faster since now it doesn't have to leave your local network (if you use it with unbound) else even if you set upstream DNS on pi-hole it will be the same because ping/response time in local network is <1ms and to reach the third-party DNS it would be still the same what you had earlier.

As for getting something unnecessarily blocked. you'd have to try yourself. Don't use too many lists from a lot of places so you won't find this an issue. So there's nothing to worry about.

View attachment 129093

I have the above setup and have no issues across 15+ devices used for all kinds of stuff. I do have a whitelist of 200+ address but I added only around 10+ domains to an already curated whitelist.
Click to expand...
Can you share your blocklists (and whitelist) please
 
m0h1t said:
Can you share your blocklists (and whitelist) please
Click to expand...
PFA.
Forum does not allow uploading of tar.gz files so I appended .zip at the end.
Remove .zip and then use the screenshot as reference how to import the backup.

After importing update the adlists by using pihole -g command.
 

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gwrench2000 said:
I have noticed in later versions, that android will use google dns and not care two hoots about pihole or adblock for that matter. We can (force) use of pihole for entire network by using a NAT redirect from firewall/router or as i discovered it works better with pihole+stubby+next dns and so called **private dns** settings in android.. Benifit is that the android phone benefits from the blocking even when I am **not** connected to my wifi and using ISP/4G. Stubby ensures all (upstream) DNS queries are encrypypted. I do agree we could also do this with adblock+stubby+openwrt, provided the router has sufficent memory and cpu.
Click to expand...

true, but in that case you are not using pihole but nextdns - you dont need the pihole on 4g. android private dns / tls is using a dns provider with adblock w/o pihole :). the same applies to apple device using the dns profile input.
 
Hey there
Can you guys help... my rpi 4b isn't booting
Had changed routers and it lost connection so I switched off and on but it didn't come online for a couple of days, the red and green lights kept coming on and off..

Today it was all dead, seems the constant booting ruined the cable as the cable isn't working and also the pi insnt booting, no lights whsoever, tried many chargers and cablez.


Any way to fix
Thanks
 
dexterz said:
should I have a secondary DNS mentioned in my router's dhcp dns settings or only the pihole's ip?
Click to expand...
Only pihole, otherwise you don't know when a device switches to secondary DNS and starts getting ads. You don't want that.
This assumes that your Pihole server will be up 24x7 (and it should be), if not you'll lose internet access.
 
enthusiast29 said:
Only pihole, otherwise you don't know when a device switches to secondary DNS and starts getting ads. You don't want that.
This assumes that your Pihole server will be up 24x7 (and it should be), if not you'll lose internet access.
Click to expand...
thanks. i've removed the secondary dns. was set to cloudflare 1.1.1.1
 
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