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I just set up pihole recently and it blows my mind how almost 15% of requests are trackers/garbage. I highly recommend setting one up and donating to them if possible. You can always use balena if you're not tech savvy enough [1]. The easiest solution is to use AdGuards DNS that has most of these blocked for you [2].

[1] https://www.balena.io/blog/deploy-network-wide-ad-blocking-w...

[2] https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html

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15%

That's actually low! Once you add some custom lists, it'll go higher than that. The lowest ratio of blocked requests I see is 38% on mine. When I use a news reader app on my phone, it goes up to around 55%.

Any custom list suggestions?

I don't pay much attention to which is which; if you search for "pihole adlist" you'll find lots of recommendations.

FYI: You can add the list URLs in the web interface to "Group Management > Adlists" It took me a while to realize that.

https://github.com/Perflyst/PiHoleBlocklist/blob/master/Smar...

https://github.com/crazy-max/WindowsSpyBlocker/blob/master/d...

https://github.com/Truvis/CodeDrop/blob/master/PiHoleDNS_scr...

https://github.com/kbinani/adblock-youtube-ads/blob/master/b...

https://github.com/mmotti/pihole-regex/blob/master/regex.lis...

https://gitlab.com/ookangzheng/dbl-oisd-nl/raw/master/dbl.tx...

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CHEF-KOCH/Audio-fingerprin...

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/mas...

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LanikSJ/ubo-filters/master...

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hectorm/hmirror/master/dat...

(edited = formatting)

Many thanks!

I’ve been thinking about doing this as a weekend project.

Does the hardware limitations of the pi mess with download or upload speeds at all?

Any weird sites that don’t work with it running?

How much better is it than something like ublock origin?

> Does the hardware limitations of the pi mess with download or upload speeds at all?

Not at all (at least for me on a 100mbit connection with the Pi 3B+). I've read you could even use a pizero if you don't care about the Web interface being all that snappy.

> Any weird sites that don’t work with it running?

You set your own blocklists so you can choose how permissive you want to be. I have something like 1MM blacklisted URLs and rarely find sites to be completely broken. It's easy to temporarily pause the blocker, or add a single domain to the whitelist.

> How much better is it than something like ublock origin?

uBlock origin has the advantage of hiding content directly from the page, whereas pihole tends to leave a greyed out box where the ad used to be. I tend to use both at the same time anyway.

Not OP, but I'm using NextDNS -- the managed version of a PiHole. I have uBlock Origin and uMatrix in all my desktop browsers, and I'm seeing around 15% blocked queries on NextDNS. Most of the blocked traffic seem to come from my mobile devices.

It's just a self hosted DNS so there shouldn't be any speed reduction (goes straight to Google's DNS if it's not blocked). It very different from ublock origin that reads the html directly from the website. Since it's DNS based, it's not perfect hence why they recommend using pihole + ublock origin. The nice thing about it is that it blocks most ads pretty well (even on your phone) without breaking anything if you use the right host list, and blocks all the telemetry network wide (if you change the DNS on the router).

Do you have to use Google’s DNS?

I’m currently trying to phase off my dependence on them.

Gotta wonder what kind of ad tracking/targeting they do based on DNS lookups you send them

There are multiple DNS options. Or you can just use Unbound and be your own DNS.

https://i.imgur.com/3sVDwhQ.png

https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/unbound/

You can configure any DNS server you like

Just put Steven Black's host list[1] in to /etc/hosts

Not sure what, apart from extra cpu cycles, pihole adds over this.

[1] - https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

I used to do that, but then all of those blocked domains start appearing in the ssh auto-completion alongside those configured in ssh config, which gets annoying.

I prefer dnscrypt-proxy over PiHole if you don't want a UI.

NOTE: A benefit of PiHole/dnscrypt proxy on a local server like the raspberry pi is that you can use it across your devices instead of just on your laptop.

Big advantage for me is network wide blocking on all devices with one central location to manage lists.

How ironic that the balena.io site uses Google Analytics!

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