FORT PI-HOLE
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The idea of a whitelist is that any sites on the list are passed by untouched by the adblocker. At the risk of sounding preachy, if there’s a website you’re particularly fond of and visit often, it’s worth whitelisting it so that it still makes money from your visits. You will see the ads, but it’s a small price to pay for helping make sure your favorite sites don’t vanish behind a paywall or close down.
To whitelist a site, head to the web interface and choose whitelist from the left-hand side. Once on the page, add the URL of the site you want in the ‘domain’ box. If the site has subdomains, it’s worth ticking the ‘wildcard’ box. Press the Add To Whitelist button. That’s all there is to it.
4 PI-HOLE INSTALLATION
Open Terminal, and type this without the quotation marks: “curl -SSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash”. This is an installation script that takes care of the whole process, with you answering a few questions along the way, such as who you’d like your DNS provider to be, and whether you want the web admin interface to be installed. We chose OpenDNS and said yes to the web interface, as well as accepting all the recommended settings [ Image B]. You might also want to write down the web admin password you’re given at the end of the process. You can change it using this Terminal command: “pihole -a -p”. This is worth doing, as the password generated by the Pi-Hole software will be a random jumble that’s difficult to remember.
5 WEB INTERFACE
There’s no app to see on the host machine, it doesn’t even appear as an entry on the Raspberry menu. Instead, you have a web interface. Open a web browser on any computer attached to your home network, type in the Pi-Hole’s IP address (the static one you set earlier), and append /admin. Ours was 192.168.1.53/admin, and yours will be something similar. It’s worth exploring the interface, but if you’ve ever tinkered with the settings of a router, you’ll be right at home. Leave it running long enough and you’ll get graphs too. There’s lots of interesting information to be gleaned from the data—Logitech and Netflix, representing some IoT devices and probably a smart TV or two, are by far the biggest abusers of our internet connection, beating even Google for home-phoning frequency.
6 DNS REDIRECTION
Ideally, you’ll change the setting on your router to use the Pi-Hole as the primary DNS server. This is a simple case of finding the relevant setting on your router’s web interface and changing the IP address to the static IP of your Pi-Hole. Leave the
secondary as it is, so in case the Pi-Hole fails, you won’t lose the ability to browse websites completely.
>> Doing it this way forces all your internet traffic through the hole, meaning every device that connects is covered. It can strip advertising from smart TV interfaces, YouTube videos, and more. Some ISPs, however, especially those who supply their own hardware, like to lock you out of changing the DNS server. If this is the case, you can change it for a Windows PC by going to Settings > Network & internet > Status and choosing Properties under your active network connection.
>> Under IP Settings, choose Edit, and change from Automatic DHCP to Manual. In the next screen, turn on IPv4, and enter the IP address of your PC (from your router’s admin page), followed by a Subnet Prefix Length of 24, the IP of your router under Gateway, and the PiHole IP address in Preferred DNS. Change Alternative DNS to the secondary DNS server you have in your router, or use 8.8.8.8 for Google’s DNS service [ Image C].
7 LEAVE IT TO IT
And that’s all you need to do. If you can’t update your router to send all traffic through the PiHole, you will at least be able to use it with any Windows machines, and never see an advert in your browser again. Apart from any whitelisted sites, naturally.