[SOLVED] Is pi-hole useful ?

hifi100 · 03-15-2020, 02:30 AM

Hi,
I use Firefox with the following addons (please see attachment)

Q1) What is the purpose of pi-hole ? Never used it.
Q2) With all those addons on Firefox does it make sense to use pi-hole ?

ondoho · 03-15-2020, 04:49 AM

pihole is a glorified /etc/hosts blocklist.
You need separate hardware, it will then act as a DNS server (more or less).
This is an advanced topic, and before you ask further questions I have to ask you to do some research on DNS (domain name system & resolution) and adblocking through HOSTS.

Personally, I think you should first solve the issues from your other thread before taking any further steps.

And I'll say it again: There's no One-Click solution to this, even if you buy a raspberry pi.
You must be willing to accept less convenience and read some documentation.

berndbausch · 03-15-2020, 04:52 AM

If you want to know the purpose of pi-hole, it'd be more efficient to check the pi-hole web site than asking the question hete.

It's an ad blocker that works as a DNS server which redirects ad domains to nowhere. S far as I understand it, anyway.

You seem to have an ad blocker already.

pan64 · 03-15-2020, 06:04 AM

pi-hole can be useful, yes, if you are really interested better to read the original web site. it can be run on an RPi or similar hardware or in a container too.
But it will not solve your "online tracking" issues, this is a quite different story.

hifi100 · 03-15-2020, 06:45 AM

Okay now I understand the overall use of pi-hole.
If in future I decide to buy a Raspberry Pi I will give it a try.
Thanks to all for the replies.

Hermani · 03-20-2020, 06:03 PM

You can also run Pi-hole in a Docker container on a running Linux machine. I have a Ubuntu based server and it is very reliably running Pi-hole.

When running a containerized Pi-Hole please be sure that the container will have its own IP adress within your local network, so it is accessible to all the devices on your network and it can use the appropriate inbound ports.

You can read all about containerized Pi-hole on the Github page: https://github.com/pi-hole/docker-pi-hole or https://hub.docker.com/r/diginc/pi-hole at the Docker hub page.

Read up on how to directly connect the Pi-Hole container to your network in the "macvlan" section of the Docker website on https://docs.docker.com/network/macvlan/ or this tutorial: https://docs.docker.com/network/netw...orial-macvlan/.

On my own machine I had to configure the macvlan network using the terminal. However I manage the containers using Portainer, a IMHO very nice tool to get going with Docker containers.

You can see the action on my Pi-hole container in the attached image. As you can see it sees only 1 client. That does not mean only one device is using it. I configured my router to use the internal Pi-hole as the primary DNS server. I suppose all queries go through the router so Pi-hole only sees the router querying it. As you can see over 40% of all DNS queries are blocked. And nobody in our family actually notices. Which means a lot of privacy not lost to whoever is trying to get some.