pi-hole/pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements (designed for Raspberry Pi)

pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements (designed for Raspberry Pi)

Works on most Debian distributions as well. Hopefully on opensuse one day as well.

Source: pi-hole/pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements (designed for Raspberry Pi)

Not exactly the nicest way of installing though:

curl -L install.pi-hole.net | bash

Source: Pi-Hole: A Black Hole For Internet Advertisements

Source: In the past year, a similar threat has begun to emerge on mobile devices:…

Note that any ad-block mechanism needs curation to white/black list some stuff. But: who does that and who watches the curators?

Source: In the past year, a similar threat has begun to emerge on mobile devices: So-called overlay malware that impersonates login pages from popular apps and… – Jeroen Wiert Pluimers – Google+

via:

• OK, so I set up Pi-Hole on my old Eee PC and actually got it to work for all devices in my LAN/WLAN by allowing external IP addresses in dnsmasq and… – Thomas Mueller (dummzeuch) – Google+
• Für die Technikfreunde: gestern Abend Pi-hole auf meinem Raspberry installiert. Die beste Sache seit geschnittenem Brot. Keine Werbung mehr im Heimnetz … – Lübbe Onken – Google+
• My Commuting and Computing Misadventures: AdBlocking with Pi-Hole and Ubuntu 14.04 on VirtualBox
• Guide: Installing PiHole on an Ubuntu Server to Block Ads on your Network – Networking – Spiceworks
• Pi-hole without a Pi. On a DO VPS. : raspberry_pi

Some more links for when you get this going:

• The pi-hole git source consists of two parts:
  • the installer/DNS handler at https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole
  • the web interface at https://github.com/pi-hole/AdminLTE.git which is obtained by the installer
• How to Setup a Pi-Hole Ad Blocker – YouTube
• https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/wiki
• Whitelist Assistant by DNSthingy – Chrome Web Store (via: https://www.reddit.com/r/pihole/comments/4qwq24/pihole_is_a_great_idea_poorly_executed/)
• Temporarily stop PiHole – reddit
• pi-hole/pauseResume.sh at pause-resume-pihole · pi-hole/pi-hole

Changing hostname

As all raspbian hosts advertise their hostname as raspberrypi it is confusing to set them apart, so I changed the hostname in these files:

/etc/hostname
/etc/hosts
/etc/wicd/wired-settings.conf
/etc/wicd/wireless-settings.conf

Then rebooted (probably could have done sudo /etc/init.d/hostname.sh) to force the new hostname to be used everywhere.

DHCP versus static IP

Note that pi-hole by default converts the DHCP assigned address on eth0 to a static one. This makes it harder to use pi-hole in these situations:

• preparing a pi-hole on network A and deploying it on network B
• using pi-hole on a DHCP based network where the DHCP server hands out fixed IP addresses based on MAC

To get going I:

1. filed an issue Work with DHCP address instead of static IP address configuration. · Issue #629 · pi-hole/pi-hole
2. plugged in the Edimax EW-7811Un 150Mbps 11n Wi-Fi USB Adapter  which appeared as wlan0 in the ifconfig list
3. failed in getting wicd-curses to work: it would only detect half of the WiFi networks that iwlist wlan0 scan detects.
4. used the steps at Setting WiFi up via the command line – Raspberry Pi Documentation to get WLAN going:
   1. perform sudo iwlist wlan0 scan | grep ESSID scan to get a list of networks and their (E)SSID names
   2. append the below fragment to the end of /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf and correct the value for ssid to the ESSID (keep the double quotes around it) and psk to the password for that ESSID (also keep the double quotes around it)
   3. performed sudo ifdown wlan0  and sudo fup wlan0 to force a WiFi connection refresh
   4. waited 30 seconds for a DHCP address to appear in ifconfig for wlan0

network={
    ssid="The_ESSID_from_earlier"
    psk="Your_wifi_password"
}

–jeroen