Ad blocking with Raspberry Pi and Pi-hole

Published on 2020-05-03
By christian fei

Sick of ads on the Web, YouTube and other services?

Do you have a Raspberry Pi (4, 3, or even a Zero like me) laying around collecting dust and you want to make use of it?

Use it for ad-blocking in your home network and to finally browse the web, watch videos etc. without annoying ads.

One-liner install

Take out your Raspberry Pi from your forgotten drawer and connect to it via SSH.

Now run the following for a simple installation of Pi-hole:

curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

Follow the on-screen instructions based on your preferences (query logging, static IP etc.) and you’re one-step away for a ad-free experience while browsing the Web.

NB: Keep track of the password to access the admin panel!

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Configure the Router or individual devices

If you don’t want to fiddle around with your router configuration, you can configure each device indidually.

That’s the easiest method I find. For more information see discourse.pi-hole.net.

On your devices, head over to the DNS settings, and set as the only DNS server address the Raspberry’s IP:

On iOS

On Mac OS

Verify DNS resolution

To verify that the Raspberry Pi is used for DNS resolution, you can use a simple trick.

I used dig to interrogate DNS name servers, like this:

dig +trace cri.dev

You’ll see a similar output (check for your Raspberry’s IP address):

~ dig +trace cri.dev

; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> +trace cri.dev
;; global options: +cmd
.			509447	IN	NS	a.root-servers.net.
.			509447	IN	NS	b.root-servers.net.
.			509447	IN	NS	c.root-servers.net.
.			509447	IN	NS	d.root-servers.net.
.			509447	IN	NS	e.root-servers.net.
.			509447	IN	NS	f.root-servers.net.
.			509447	IN	NS	g.root-servers.net.
.			509447	IN	NS	h.root-servers.net.
.			509447	IN	NS	i.root-servers.net.
.			509447	IN	NS	j.root-servers.net.
.			509447	IN	NS	k.root-servers.net.
.			509447	IN	NS	l.root-servers.net.
.			509447	IN	NS	m.root-servers.net.
.			509447	IN	RRSIG	NS 8 0 518400 20200516050000 20200503040000 48903 . NtC6ObYfTRgLakuNLhMl ...
;; Received 525 bytes from 192.168.1.127#53(192.168.1.127) in 60 ms

...

As you can see, the Raspberry Pi’s IP address (192.168.1.127 on port 53) is first interrogated for the DNS resolution.

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Admin Panel

Pi-hole’s administration panel can be accessed at http://{PI_IP_ADDRESS}/admin and optionally configure it further.

Personally, I prefer to set the DNS resolver privacy level to Anonymous mode so that even in your own home-network your privacy is respected.

## Donate to pi-hole

Head over to pi-hole.net/donate/ and if you’re feeling generous, support pi-hole for the greater good.