RPi resurrection - Pt. I - Pi-hole
RPi resurrection - Pt. I - Pi-hole
Couple months ago, got to know about the Pi-hole project. It's an ad-block server that can you can configure at the network level. That is, it can be configured as the DNS in your home router.
Of course, the benefit of network-wide ad-blocking is that it does its job in all of your home devices. If however, your router does not allow configuring a DNS -- then you'd have to configure the DNS on a per-device level. While it may sound painful, but trust me, it's worth it!
Thanks to online advertising -- reading even a simple news article has become painful. While a lot of people use ad-block plugins, these plugins are, limited to browsers. How do you deal with ads on devices where one does not use the browser -- e.g. while playing games, etc? That's where a network-level ad-blocking gets an upper hand!
Okay, I just realised that I haven't talked about why is "RPi" there in this post's title. The thing is, I came across a post on Pi-hole as I was looking for a better (read: any) use for a legacy Pi2 -- which was lying about mostly unused -- thanks to it being trumped by newer Pis that I got later.
Seems being a Pi-hole server is one of the best uses that I could've put it to! The admin console is a rich and responsive UI, which allows your to further tweak the Pi-hole server as per your needs, for example: for explicitly allowing/denying any ad server, blocking specific keywords, etc.
Depending upon your privacy requirements, there're also options to not log, or enable data masking/anonymise the data that is logged.
Anyway, as Apache Indian would have put it: 'nuff said! Do go ahead and try it out this amazing project and may you bask in the glory of an ad-free world! And oh, btw, one doesn't really need a RaspberryPi for Pi-hole -- you can potentially install it on anything -- andd...there's a Docker image as well!