Pi-hole!

Since the family is out of the house, Dad thought it would be non-consequential to offload the home network’s DNS requests from the router to an independent server. This idea has been a ‘stuck thought’ in my mind for a while as a colleague of mine, (I’m talking about you Scoot!) have been praising openDNS’s ability to censor the internet for age specific audiences.

Scoot uses pi-hole in a docker container for his network which sparked the idea to do the same on one of my abandoned pine64 boards. I slapped on a minimal Ubuntu image and instead of running docker, i just installed pi-hole right on ubuntu. The commands I used are provided below

$ sudo apt update && upgrade -y
$ sudo apt install git
$ sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces.d/eth0
    iface eth0 inet static
    address x.x.x.x
    netmask x.x.x.x
    gateway x.x.x.x
    dns-nameservers 208.67.222.222 208.67.220.220
$ sudo reboot
$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole.git pi-hole
$ cd pi-hole/automated\ install/
$ bash basic-install.sh

I just used all defaults… yes’d and ok’d with no regard. After it was completed, you access the admin page via
http://x.x.x.x/admin
with the credentials provided at the end of the basic-install.sh script.

I manually pointed a laptop I had around to use pi-hole and started testing sites and different services I use from the internet. Worked like a charm out of the box! Ads disappeared and depending on the web host, would either show up as a white space, or a failed to load image. That’s fine with me.

So there was one final configuration needed to cement it as production. I changed the DHCP settings to configure the clients to purely use the pi-hole server but I still had several statically mapped host mappings that would resolve local resources. I determined it was easier to just forward those requests back to the router and maintain those specific requests at the router/dhcp service. Code below

$ sudo vi /etc/dnsmasq.d/02-somename.conf
    server=/domain.com/{router ip}
    server=/{router ip in in-addr arpa form}/{router ip}

//Then in the /admin console, enable Connectional Forwarding in the Advanced DNS settings.

Overall I’m very pleased with pi-hole… it’s blackholeing ads quite reliably and I have not seen any performance issues running it on a pine64. The cpu idles around 50 °C, RAM stays around 80MBs and I will continue to monitor its performance for the next couple weeks. However, overall, I am quite pleased and highly recommend it for your own network.

Upgrading

Couple months later, Dad noticed that there are updates available for pine-hole. Upgrading is easy.

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
$ pihole -up --check-only
$ pihole -up