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Comment by aurbano | Hacker News Reader

I already have uBlock Origin on Firefox, with tracking protection set to strict and I don't really remember seeing ads on desktop.

I guess the main benefit of the PiHole is to have ad blocking on mobile devices, iPads... and others, do you think this is worth the effort of setting up in your experience?

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It's worth it if you have a lot of "secondary" devices on your network (phones, tablets, smart tvs, game consoles, IOT devices) because then you get ad blocking and no tracking for free on devices you couldn't otherwise effectively block. If you have a lot of those sorts of devices then it's definitely worth it. If you have an extra Raspberry Pi laying around, and are comfortable adjusting your DNS settings on your router, then it's definitely worth it too. I have PiHole running my DHCP server as well, so I can assign static IPs to my devices as well, which is nice if you have any servers running or like to SSH into devices.

That's the reason why I switched to Firefox on my android device. You can install ublock (and dark reader) and it really changes the browsing experience on your phone. It's a somewhat worse browser experience, but to not have ads and have every website be in dark mode is quite glorious.

You can see a screenshot from my VPN pihole blocking tracking requests from my android phone and make a decision do you need it or not.

https://i.imgur.com/Hpcw42h.png

Damn, that's amazing.. can't believe 76% of requests are unnecessary.

Assuming you're running this on a RPi at home, do you have DynDNS or how are you managing the external IP?

I have similar numbers. 90% of the blocked requests I see come from 3 apps that are particularly diligent about submitting metrics. 2 phones have outlook installed and boy does outlook hate when metrics fails! Those phones alone account for half of the DNS requests in a network with about 15 devices, despite being out of the house for 9 hours every day.

I have this running on a Hetzner server and connecting my phone to it with Wireguard.

At home I have another pihole running in my router.

Without list of sites it blocks those numbers are useless. I could setup to block only news.ycombinator.com and the result would be similar

Default configuration from pihole.

https://i.imgur.com/oUdclA7.png

Yes. I have local adblockers running (umatrix in Firefox, ublock origin in Chrome), plus Pihole.

Currently using ublock origin and thinking of adding the pihole (party cause it just seems like a fun weekend project). Anyone have experience with how often maintenance needs to be done and/or settings need to be tweaked on the pihole? Hoping for something I won't have to fiddle with more than every couple months once it's set up.

The management page will tell you if there's an update. I don't remember if it lets you update it from there, because I always login through SSH and run the update command anyway. I rarely need to change blocklists; mostly I temporarily disable blocking for a few seconds for something else to work.

I run my Pihole on an Ubuntu system with other things (not running on a Raspberry Pi), so my issues might not be yours. The update process always resets the management port. After rebooting the system, I have to manually restart the Pihole process for Pihole to work.

The effort is super low, the most time consuming step is downloading Raspbian and flashing it to the SD card. And _as soon_ as I set it up I noticed how much faster it makes things (I was already running ad blockers).

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