Ban ads for your devices with Pi-Hole

With Pi-Hole you can get rid of Ads for all your devices within your local network. It works, like Ad-Away for Android, as DNS-Filter. Domains on downloadable Blacklists are blocked and overmore a Pi-Hole works as gateway to a DNS-Server of you choice (e.g. from Digital Courage). Pi-Hole is slick and comes with a neat webinterface.

To install simply type on your Raspbian or even Debian:

curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

After the installation make sure to make your devices find Pi-Hole as DNS-Server within the LAN. This can be done in the settings of your router.

Local DNS Server with unbound

If you want to use a local DNS-Server as source for Pi-Hole you can use unbound. Here is the link to the instructions

https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns/unbound/

Local names of machines

If you want to access your internal machines with their names instead of IP-Addresses make sure you enable the LAN-DNS Server functionality fully:

echo "addn-hosts=/etc/pihole/lan.list" | sudo tee /etc/dnsmasq.d/02-lan.conf

After this, create a “hosts file” for your network /etc/pihole/lan.list with the format ipaddress fqdn hostname, eg:

10.42.23.40     fritz.your.lan  fritz
10.42.23.41     franz.your.lan   franz
10.42.23.42     friedel.your.lan  friedel

and finally:

sudo pihole restartdns

Update Pi-Hole

Use this shell-script in crontab to update your pi-hole regularly:

#!/bin/bash
apt update -q4
apt upgrade -V
apt autoremove -y
apt autoclean -y
pihole -up
exit 0

Reset password

use this command to reset your password on to the pi-hole interface:

pihole -a -p