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Comment by crispinb | Hacker News Reader

Tempting because playing with Raspberry Pis is always quite fun. I'm not sure why - I can spend an hour doing something on a Pi that would make me groan to bother with otherwise.

But a question for anyone who's done this Presumably most of the computing devices in your home make their way onto other networks from time to time. So you need a per-device solution to the ad infestation in any case. What's the point of adding a house-wide one?

This is the consideration that's stopped me doing this so far - the adblocker I currently use is going to have to remain in place regardless, so what would a Pi Hole add (other than a pleasurable hour or so toying around)?

[Edit: I don't have a smart tv, google home or similar net-connected but unhackable device]

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Never let the good be the enemy of the perfect :) adding a PiHole will work for all your devices at home, tablets that don't usually leave the house etc.

It doesn't stop you from running adblockers on devices in addition. As it takes about 10 mins to setup it's totally worth trying out.

I'm tempted, but can you think of anything it adds over device-installed solutions (which all my devices have, and will keep because they all travel)?

1) The annoying “we have detected that you are using an adblocker” pop ups go away.

2) You get nice graphs. This is surprisingly addictive. I’m just trying to feed it into Grafana now, to make one dashboard to rule them all.

3) You can block other stuff easily, which is handy for sites you don’t want visited accidentally (which is also possible in my adblocker).

4) Removes DHCP and DNS from the crappy ISP router.

5) It’s on a Pi and as mentioned elsewhere here, that somehow makes a chore into something fun.

Thanks, some good points there - though I'll claim 5 as my own! I can feel a bout of Pi play nearing.

Becuase the blocking happens at the router (ish) level, it should also prevent adverts inside applications where you can't run a blocker, eg mobile apps.

That doesn't solve the problem when you're out of the house although you can set up your devices to use your pi as a dns server when you're away from home.

https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/vpn/overview/

Fair point as applied to browser-based adblockers. In my case I use Adguard, which works as a proxy on a PC/Mac, or a VPN on android. AFAIK Pi Hole would just be duplicating what I already have. Worth considering though when my current Adguard licences expire.

I also use Adguard (the free DNS resolver) on my phone for roaming, but use the pihole in my local home. Two advantages for me of the pihole are a more pleasant Android experience (none of these Android notifications that apps are running in the background, better battery life, etc), and my ability to the block lists and the frequency with which they update.

I'd not heard of adguard, it does sound like duplication. I also quite like it when visitors connect to our network and wonder where their ads went ;)

If you have a data cap, pi holes (in my experience) are better at blocking bad usage of data in my home network. Oftentimes client side adblockers still end up downloading said ad data before the data isn't rendered or removed on the page.

The Pi Hole is blocking at the DNS level, which comes with pros and cons compared to a browser based ad blocker. You should absolutely run both. The Pi Hole can catch ads in apps and other places your browser based ad blocker wouldn't, and the browser blocker will catch any ads that don't have their own DNS lookup. Also the Pi Hole acts as a local DNS cache, which will speed things up slightly in some cases.

I've long used Adguard rather than a browser-extension blocker. Android is a shitshow without some kind of system-wide ad/tracker blocking, which drew my attention to Adguard. I liked it so installed it everywhere.

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