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Has anyone implemented Pie-Hole yet?

DesertRatt

DesertRatt

All Bark, No Bite!
I ordered the gadgets needed for a full Pie-Hole implementation. They should be here a a few days. It came to about $120 for a new router, a Raspberry-Pi, micro SD. The goal is complete TV ad blocking, and complete shut down of all TV Telematic spying.

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I have had a Raspberry-Pi with pi-hole setup for years. Has been rock solid. Occasionally I have to disable it to get a link I want to use to work. I started with the default blacklist with the intent to change it but never did.
 
Well, I did get the Pi Hole up and running yesterday.
So far it is unimpressive. I have only the default Blocking List loaded, which is apparently not sufficient. I understand there are several other more aggressive block lists available. That is today's project.

Although not many ads are blocked, it is blocking tons of telematics. We have five or six Apple devices and Holy Cow, Apple is trying to send back data dozens of times per minute.

Hoping for better performance.
 
I've never set up Pi-hole, but had considered the concept. If I were to consider something of that nature, I'd run it on something virtual, like a docker/LXC container.

But, when reviewing Pi-hole and considering my options, my understanding was it is not effective on streaming services because they embed the ads from the same services as what provides the video streams themselves using the same ports. It isn't like what you see on browsers where ads are sent from different servers. If you deny one, you deny the other as well.

The telemetrics you're seeing is run of the mill activity for this day and age (unfortunately). That's where companies make their money. That halo that Apple has definitely isn't earned. I used to chuckle at how so many people were infatuated with Apple 10-12 years ago, and how secure they supposedly were.

Then Wikileaks crushed their little bubble.

I'm in the process of building services that will allow me to analyze the network traffic in my home network environment. That's what I used to do professionally. One point of interest is the AndroidTV device I use. I did set up a vlan and isolated it from the rest of my network, however. I'll set up port mirroring and pipe all the traffic in my network into a server that processes the traffic.
 
@DesertRatt let us know what you find out about blacklist alternatives. I should probably update mine. When I looked into it years ago the Big List from oisd.nl sounded interesting but that is probably out of date.

As well as blocking telemetry pi-hole stops most ads from being displayed on webpages. It is quite jarring seeing just how many ads there are when I am away from home. The downside to this is many free news sites will block you if they cannot display ads.

Being DNS based pi-hole is not meant to blocks ads embedded in video on YouTube / streaming services.
 
I set it up a a mini PC but I'm having some trouble configuring my network to get it to block ads. More study required...
 
I finished it up this morning. I now have three lists:
1.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts

2.https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists/main/adblock/pro.txt

3.https://big.oisd.nl

Those 3 together are the generally recognized ones that work well. I was a bit disappointed to find out ROKU, PRIME and others often use the same URL to show the program and the ads, so those can't be blocked on TV. But, when using the PC or tablets, website ads are generally killed.

Probably more important to me was killing the telematics. It's shocking to see how often devices are "calling home". Almost 100% of that is being blocked. From our house, Apple was trying about 500 times a day to send stuff back home.

Not sure it is as useful as I projected in my imagination. I spent about $70 to do it. It was very interesting to really learn more about network communications - which I had precious little knowledge of. The Pi devices are really cool little computers.

 
mrehorst said:
I set it up a a mini PC but I'm having some trouble configuring my network to get it to block ads. More study required...
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I've used a a Pi as my main PC for almost 8 yrs now. I've never had ads on any site, including YouTube (not a paying member either). No network config necessary.
 
DesertRatt said:

Not sure it is as useful as I projected in my imagination. I spent about $70 to do it. It was very interesting to really learn more about network communications - which I had precious little knowledge of. The Pi devices are really cool little computers.
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Yeah, I think being introduced into the world of homelabbing is the real win. Not sure what you are doing for a router, but I highly recommend setting up an old PC as an OPNsense box...especially with how the US has gone insane about routers.

You'll have a 48U rack with separate Proxmox, XigmaNAS, and OPNsense servers before you know it.

...Except that storage is so expensive that I don't know how practical it is to set up a significant file server anymore.
 
Ive got a PiHole config'ed pi around here somewhere, but I haven't been able to find it since the move. Need it more than ever now with the TV boxes etc.
 
nintendoeats said:
Yeah, I think being introduced into the world of homelabbing is the real win. Not sure what you are doing for a router, but I highly recommend setting up an old PC as an OPNsense box...especially with how the US has gone insane about routers.

You'll have a 48U rack with separate Proxmox, XigmaNAS, and OPNsense servers before you know it.

...Except that storage is so expensive that I don't know how practical it is to set up a significant file server anymore.
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Cool -- - - although most of what you said is like GREEK to me! :oops:

I have to say, I was really impressed with what this little Raspberry can do. I had heard of them, but never dipped a toe. And, it was kinda cheap - I paid $54 for the Pi.
 
DesertRatt said:
Cool -- - - although most of what you said is like GREEK to me! :oops:

I have to say, I was really impressed with what this little Raspberry can do. I had heard of them, but never dipped a toe. And, it was kinda cheap - I paid $54 for the Pi.
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I assume it was a Pi4? That's a very good deal for a Pi5. Unfortunately the Pi5s have gotten very expensive and the next generation is supposed to be worse. SBCs (Single Board Computers) have really climbed in price from where they were.

OPNsense is open source router software based on FreeBSD. It can actually do the job of pihole, though it's not uncommon to run both. Switching from another router to using OPNsense as your gateway/firewall can range from very easy to extremely difficult, depening on your ISP and your wi-fi arrangement.

XigmaNAS is a NAS (Network Attached Storage) OS, also based on FreeBSD. TrueNAS used to be the go to, but I've had too many problems with it to recommend anymore. The point is, they are both designed to easily expose a bunch of hard drives to your network so all of your devices can access them.

Proxmox is a hypervisor, meaning an OS that runs VMs (Virtual Machines), this time based on Debian Linux. Imagine if you had one physical computer, but it actually behaved like 10 little computers, each isolated from each other. You could, for example, reboot one VM without disrupting either the host (hypervisor) or any of the other VMs. This is very useful. For example, my PiHole is actually a VM running on my Proxmox server.

48U means "really f***ing tall".
 
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I imagine my setup is baby-step basic.

I have an Archer AX1500 router and Pi-3B is attached to the LAN port. Then the Pi is connected to our COX Internet Gateway box via the WAN port.

Once again, I used Co-Pilot to give super detailed step by step instructions - especially regarding getting the Pi OS onto the SD card, and PiHole SW on the OS. Not hard, but loaded with tiny details and terminal commands.
 
DesertRatt said:
I imagine my setup is baby-step basic.

I have an Archer AX1500 router and Pi-3B is attached to the LAN port. Then the Pi is connected to our COX Internet Gateway box via the WAN port.
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We all start somewhere. My first "server" was just a hard drive that came in a network enclosure, so you are ahead of that.

It depends on that box. If it is literally just a modem, then you would be all set. You'd just want to put the Archer in a mode where it only acts as an access point instead of as a gateway.

In case you don't know, in networking a gateway is a device that allows traffic from one network to flow to another (in this case your LAN is one network and the internet, or WAN, is another). Ideally, you only have one gateway to the internet. Connecting a gateway to another gateway is generally ok, but it can sometimes cause weird issues and is very annoying if you ever want to allow incoming connections from the internet.

Often ISPs will provide a separate modem and wi-fi router, in which case the wi-fi router is the gateway and the modem is just a translator. Other times they will provide a single device that does both jobs; usually in this case it will have a PPPoE mode which essentially allows it to function as just a modem. Some very evil ISPs provide combination devices with no PPPoE...and that's why Bell no longer has my business.

There are ways to completely bypass the ISP's hardware, but they aren't for beginners unless you want to just jump straight down the rabbit hole.
 
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Just thinking here about AD Blocking on Streaming content.

It is embedded into the program, so the DNS is of no help. This means, one has to filter the content signal somehow. On Pluto, and ROKU, when ads begin there is a counter in the upper left of the screen - "1 of 5 ads" which counts down. I assume that means this counter could trip a process for say, "muting the sound" or even "blanking the picture" until the counter is at 0. Now, it would obviously be hard to get inside the TV circuits. But, if one uses an external ROKU dongle that connects with HDMI cable, then the entire signal is available to some blanking process - no?
 
The only video service that have ads that I familiar with blocking is YouTube. There are plugins available that do this and a YouTube ad blocker is built into the DuckDuckGo browser.
 
DesertRatt said:
Just thinking here about AD Blocking on Streaming content.

It is embedded into the program, so the DNS is of no help. This means, one has to filter the content signal somehow. On Pluto, and ROKU, when ads begin there is a counter in the upper left of the screen - "1 of 5 ads" which counts down. I assume that means this counter could trip a process for say, "muting the sound" or even "blanking the picture" until the counter is at 0. Now, it would obviously be hard to get inside the TV circuits. But, if one uses an external ROKU dongle that connects with HDMI cable, then the entire signal is available to some blanking process - no?
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I think HDCP would be a problem for that, but I think it's a defeatable one.


On the technical side, I have a suspicion this is better suited to an FPGA. Either that, or you just sample every 30th frame or something and accept that there will be some latency in the processing.
 
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