Blocking AWS, and blocking all of the IRS site because it has Google Analytics… that seems too hardcore to me. As we have seen, you can just block the domain requests you’re concerned about and let the rest through.
Having said that, I do think there’s going to be a reckoning. Facebook is getting hauled before government committees and courts more often. I still think Google is being more careful than them – they let you export your data, for one – but they’ve been called out too.
Okay, I have been looking at this, and as someone who hasn’t messed with any kind of programming since Pascal in High School (and even then, what I managed was not standard), I am wondering how hard it is for an average person to set up. Not average BB/Elsewheresian, Average person who does not dig into the workings of computers. Because some of it seems pretty jargon heavy, or the writers assume whoever is reading knows what they’re talking about.
I would love to set up and use something like this, but when they say things like “point X at Y”… even that has me saying “yeah, but how?”
I don’t want to spend a bunch of money on something I can’t figure out how to deploy. If I can’t easily set it up so all the devices in my household can go through it, there’s not much point. Money’s tight. If I am going to spend it, it’s going to need to be on something I can use.
I’m not super savvy with this stuff.
The basic install of a PiHole was, in my experience, very, very simple.
My specific install was a tiny bit more difficult because I added complexity with a screen attached to the Pi showing usage stats- totally unneeded.
The directions here:
Seem to be a pretty good walk through. And if you use a RaspberryPi Zero W, that’s a lot less expensive than the Pi 3 B+ I’m using.
This was my journey. No coding is required, for sure.
Buy a Raspberry Pi. Make sure you have a minimum 8GB SD card (or micro SD, whichever kind the Pi takes) to use for storage.
Download NOOBS from the Pi site.
Copy NOOBS to the SD.
Put the SD in the Pi, attach a monitor, keyboard, and mouse to the Pi. Power it up.
Follow the NOOBS setup. You will need to tell it your network password if the Pi is using wifi.
Using the Pi’s Web browser, go to the Pi-Hole web site and copy the curl command to download and install Pi-Hole.
Open a terminal window, paste the curl command in, and press Enter. Follow the instructions. Make sure you write down the Pi-Hole password.
Here comes the more technical part.
On another computer, open your router’s admin page. Find out the IP address for the Pi (depending on how many devices are on your network, this may take a little deducing. For me the Pi was the only device without a nickname, so it was obvious).
Note the MAC address for the Pi, as well as the IP. My router lists both of these together.
Go to the router’s DHCP settings and tell it the device with the Pi’s MAC address should always have its current IP address. This means if there’s a power outage, the Pi will have the same IP when everything is powered up again. This makes the next steps easier.
Go to the router’s DNS settings and tell it to use the Pi as the DNS server. Tell it to use 0.0.0.0 as the fallback DNS server (ie: just go to the net if it can’t find the Pi).
Log out of the router admin. Try a few web sites and see if ads are loading. Cracked.com is a great test site . Pi-Hole also had a page of test links.
Try accessing the Pi-Hole dashboard page from any other computer or phone but the Pi itself. If the dashboard appears, all is well.
Shut down the Pi, unplug the monitor, keyboard, and mouse, then power it up again. Wait a minute for everything to load, then check the Pi-Hole dashboard again. If it loads, you’re good. If not, you’ll have to reattach the monitor etc. to figure out what’s going on.
That’s it to get started. Eventually you’ll have to set up VNC and/or ssh so you can do software updates without having to attach a monitor etc. to the Pi, but it’s not urgent.
Hope this helps and doesn’t scare you off.
For me, the router setup part was brand new, but the way my router admin is organised it was bleeding obvious what to do.
If you’re like me, it’s best to just set aside a quiet Sunday afternoon and work through the steps. It always goes faster when you don’t feel hurried.
ETA: notice I only told my router to use the Pi. One that’s done, all your networked devices will use it automatically.
I have 2 very low powered laptops. I do not have other spare hardware. Can this be done through a laptop? Or will the Windows software interfere?
My router is also the Telus supplied modem. I have no idea how to find the router admin page. Maybe I did at one point, but that was years ago and I have forgotten, and forgotten where any cables are. And I have lost any instructions. The joys of Attention Deficits.
If you don’t know the answers, that’s fine. But this is why I bang my head when people with some tech-savvy wonder why people use Windows/Apple/Android, and not their favourite Linux distro, and it’s because the first three are plug and play, and generally don’t need extra hardware to get going.
OTOH, since I do just have two low-powered laptops (and a phone, Xbox 360 and a PS4) this seems like a better solution than weighing down the browser with more and more add-ons. I want to do it, I am just concerned about my ability to do so.
If neither of those work, you can open a windows command prompt and type ipconfig and look for the Default Gateway of the ‘Wireless LAN adapter Wi-Fi’ (assuming you’re on wifi). You’re looking for the one that looks like a ‘normal’ IP address (four numbers with . between them).
For the record, I have a 7yo laptop, and then an even older laptop with about half the RAM and hard drive of the newer machine (nicer screen though). Both of them were designed for word processing/web surfing. They were never exactly high powered.
The laptops will get you through downloading NOOBS and copying it to an SD card. For the rest you’re gong to need an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
Raspberry Pi recommend using your TV set as the monitor if it has an HDMI plug. You only need it the once for setup. I used an old 1024x768 monitor. The Pi only displays at 640x480, so you don’t need the latest and greatest.
As for the keyboard and mouse, there’s always the “buy it from a store with a good return policy and return it in a few days” strategy. If you do that, get a keyboard with a trackpad (I got a separate keyboard and mouse to work, but it was fiddly and required extra hardware).
For the router, that sounds like it’s both modern and router in one piece of gear? Mine is two separate boxes (the modem is giant and ancient, but still works). Best bet is to go on-line and look up the make and model. Most manuals are on-line as PDFs these days.
You might need to call Telus to get the admin password. If they give you the runaround or have turned off certain features, that’s probably a showstopper.
Alternative: Pi-Hole is now available to run on non-Pi machines. Check their web site and see if the alternatives are more feasible for you.
Re: Linux, distros like Ubuntu aren’t any more difficult than Windows these days, to the point that one of my brothers set up an Ubuntu machine for his decidedly non-techy MIL. She thinks she’s in Windows, and never has any trouble with it.
TV I can do. Mouse I only have the wireless, so unless there is a plugin for that, i would need one. Keyboard is the one thing that I don’t have, for sure.
Being able to use the HDMI with the TV is big, though, because it means that I can skip the monitor which is the real $$$. Keyboard might even be available at a thrift store.
And when I say Attention Deficits, it’s at the point where I can only be half-joking when I say my ADD has given me OCD, because I can’t trust myself to remember to do things, or to properly remember if I checked them. Hence checking the lights, appliances and taps (sometimes 3 or 4 times) before leaving my apartment, and that my door is locked. I have forgotten to do things and narrowly avoided catastrophe, hence the paranoia. If I am not 100% sure that I ensured everything each time then I will stress about it all day.
Thus, I am easily frustrated if things start going badly. Throw in stress from changes at work and home (new building management changing policies left, right and centre! Whee! Just what someone with anxiety needs!) and I don’t need complicated. I need things to just work.
As someone who spent most of yesterday morning freaking out over whether I’d turned the kettle off before leaving home, to the point that I went home to work so I could check on it, I can relate.
(I had turned it off. Everything was fine. But I drove most of the way to work and then drove back because I couldn’t remember and it was sending me into major anxiety mode. Being stuck in traffic while convinced the kettle is boiling itself dry at home sucks.)
If your mouse has a USB dongle of some sort, it should work no problem.
If you haven’t already taken the plunge, I would recommend picking up a 3B or 3B+ over a Zero W, if for no other reason than it has standard USB and HDMI ports, which will make hooking it up to the TV and a keyboard/mouse much easier.
I’m genuinely surprised there aren’t any kits that are essentially plug and play for this, although they probably wouldn’t be available in Canada even if they did exist. This also seems like exactly the kind of project that would be perfect for a local maker space or public library.
I just wrote up my experiences with the Pi-hole for another forum so I thought I’d add them here.
I’ve been meaning to write this up for a few days, so here we are. Overall it took me about two-ish hours from start to finish, including a couple of false steps and do-overs, so hopefully this helps you get started yourself. I’m just going to go through my process, adjust for your situation/needs as appropriate
I also picked up a micro SD card reader, a micro USB to full-size USB adapter, and a mini- HDMI to regular HDMI adapter. Only the SD card reader ended up being useful for this project.
It took a few minutes to assemble the Pi and case, but it’s pretty straightforward.
I intended to follow the Adafruit setup guide here that’s meant for use with a keyboard and monitor. The SD card I bought should have made installation of the necessary operating system easy, but as it turns out I didn’t have a compatible keyboard.
So instead I followed this guide instead for installation without a keyboard and monitor.
Briefly – Download Raspbian Lite, install to SD card, edit/add files to enable ssh and to connect to your wireless network. Then insert SD card into Pi and plug in power.
I then had to SSH into the Pi to complete the Pi-hole setup. Because I’m running Windows on my laptop I had to find a program that would let me connect. After two failures, I gave up and found an app called Termius for my ipad.
I then followed the steps in this guide for setting up Pi-hole. The first time I sent through it failed on the final step, but I simply ran the installation command again and it worked the second time.
With the Pi working and the Pi-hole working properly, I now had to start using it.
I set my ipad to use the Pi-hole as the DNS for my wifi connection and it worked just fine.
It’s been a week and a half and I’ve got a few observations: I set my wife’s iphone to use the Pi-hole and she noticed that twice her Twitter account was locked which had never happened to her before, so I removed the Pi for her. Now, she’s had a tweet get some elevated attention lately so it could have just been the usual Twitter dreck.
So far the Pi-hole hasn’t been too obtrusive for me. A couple free video apps on my ipad stopped working, but I was able to look at the Pi-hole logs and figure out which domains I needed to whitelist. It doesn’t block video ads on YouTube but it does block the text ads that would show up over videos on the desktop site. On the YouTube app the Pi-hole has stopped the watched video history from functioning. On the one hand, yay less corporate tracking. On the other hand if I stop a video to come back to later, it’s both harder to find and no longer remembers where I was.
Unfortunately there’s no option in our cable modem to use an alternative DNS so at the moment I can’t turn on Pi-hole protection for everything on the network. This is a feature I’ll be looking for in a replacement.
For some reason my laptop stopped connecting to the Pi-hole this morning. With my connection set to use the Pi-hole as DNS nothing was resolving, but removing the Pi-hole returned everything back to normal. This will require further investigation.
Thank you for sharing that, especially the part about setting up without a keyboard.
I’d probably recommend mRemoteNG or Terminals on Windows, or PuTTY if you don’t want anything fancy. (mRemoteNG uses PuTTY internally).
I use mRemoteNG for SSH work, and Terminals for RDP, even though each tool is capable of the other functionality.
. Pi-Hole also had a page of test links.