Skip to main content

Pi Hole - Ad blocking (Turbocharged!)

The entire internet is now made up of ads. To easily navigate it and find the information you are looking for, most people use ad blocking software. It improves page loading times and also uses less data (sometimes by up to 10 times!)

Google Chrome is the de facto browser of choice for most people. Google's main business is advertising. So you can see how ad-blocking software collides with Google's business objectives. When Chrome was trying to be popular, it started allowing plugins like AdBlock Plus etc. Then slowly it started partnering with them for "Acceptable Ads Program" for a lot of money. Now after cementing its position as the most popular browser, Google is now coming down hard on ad blocking software. It is turning off a Chrome API (webRequest API) which most ad blocking plug-ins use to block ads.

Enter Pi Hole. This is an amazing use of Raspberry Pi which blocks ads before they enter your network. It keeps a blacklist of most popular ad serving domains and blocks any requests sent to them.

Things you will need:

1. Raspberry Pi 3B+ Combo

That's it! Once you get your Pi, install Raspbian on it. There are tons of tutorial for doing that. After you are booted and SSHed into your Pi, just run this command:

curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

After a series of questions, Pi Hole will now be installed on your Pi and you will be presented with a slick web UI.


Next step would be to go into your router's settings and turn off DHCP. Now head over to your Pi Hole and make that your DHCP server.

This will not only make your Pi Hole the DHCP server for your network but while handing out IPs to clients it will also ask them to route all their DNS requests through it. Voila! Ad blocking for your entire home without any plugins or software on each device!

As you can see from the screen shot above, Pi Hole is currently blocking more than 40% of DNS requests from my home network. This means that more than 40% of traffic is just ads! This is insane. 

Pi Hole is an amazing little device which provided free of cost. So if you like it, consider supporting it. Happy ad-blocking!

Comments

Post a Comment

As far as possible, please refrain from posting Anonymous comments. I would really love to know who is interested in my blog! Also check out the FAQs section for the comment policy followed on this site.

Popular posts from this blog

Integrating React with SonarQube using Azure DevOps Pipelines

In the world of automation, code quality is of paramount importance. SonarQube and Azure DevOps are two tools which solve this problem in a continuous and automated way. They play well for a majority of languages and frameworks. However, to make the integration work for React applications still remains a challenge. In this post we will explore how we can integrate a React application to SonarQube using Azure DevOps pipelines to continuously build and assess code quality. Creating the React Application Let's start at the beginning. We will use npx to create a Typescript based React app. Why Typescript? I find it easier to work and more maintainable owing to its strongly-typed behavior. You can very well follow this guide for jsx based applications too. We will use the fantastic Create-React-App (CRA) tool to create a React application called ' sonar-azuredevops-app '. > npx create-react-app sonar-azuredevops-app --template typescript Once the project creation is done, we

Creating a Smart Playlist

A few days earlier I was thinking that wouldn't it be nice if I had something which will automatically generate a playlist for me with no artists repeated. Also, it would be nice if I could block those artists which I really hate (like Himesh Reshammiya!). Since I couldn't find anything already available, I decided to code it myself. Here is the outcome -  This application is created entirely in .NET Framework 4/WPF and uses Windows Media Player Library as its source of information. So you have to keep your Windows Media Player Library updated for this to work. It is tested only on Windows 7/Vista. You can download it from here . UPDATE : You can download the Windows XP version of the application here . Please provide your feedback!

Add Git Commit Hash and Build Number to a Static React Website using Azure DevOps

While working on a React based static website recently, there was a need to see exactly what was deployed in the Dev/Test environments to reduce confusion amongst teams. I wanted to show something like this: A quick look at the site's footer should show the Git Commit Hash and Build Number which was deployed and click through to actual commits and build results. Let's see how we achieved this using Azure DevOps. Git Commit Hash Azure DevOps exposes a variable called  $(Build.SourceVersion) which contains the hash of the commit. So I defined a variable in the Build Pipeline using it. Build Id and Build Number Azure DevOps also exposes two release time variables  $(Build.BuildId) and  $(Build.BuildNumber) which can be used to define custom variables in the pipeline. So we have a total of 3 variables defined: Next we use these variables in our React App. I created 3 global variables in index.html and assigned a token value to them. < script   type = "text/JavaScript&quo