Pi-hole - the first two weeks

It all started with someone trying to show me an article on their mobile phone. As an adblock user I’d forgotten how bad the world was with all the screen space being stolen by pop-unders, pop overs and I was soon done. After mulling it over for a little while I decided to use it as a flimsy excuse to buy another Raspberry Pi and trial running Pi-hole - ‘A black hole for internet advertisements’.

With the joy of Amazon Prime ensuring I’d have all the required pieces (Pi, SD Card, case and power supply) the very next day I downloaded the newest Raspian Lite image and went off to do something else. From the hardware arriving it took less than 30 minutes from getting the very pretty Etcher to burn the image to having Pi-hole installed (wrapped up with flu I didn’t trust myself to use dd correctly) and running. The documentation, initial user experience, and web admin are all very well done and provide a very smooth first encounter. I moved my iPad over to using it, manually as Virgin media routers don’t allow you to set the DNS servers via their built-in DHCP functionality(!), and instantly noticed empty spaces on a few of the tabs I reloaded.

I’ve been running pi-hole for a few weeks now and on a normal day it’s blocking between 7-12% of DNS queries, which is a nice little saving on bandwidth. The number rises significantly when family visits with all their horrible malware covered devices and other than adding it to my apt-get wrappers for security patching it’s been a great, zero touch, little service so far.