Pi Hole Home Router Setup
What is DNS?
- "Phone book" of the internet
- Hierarchical
What is Pi Hole, and why do I care?
- https://pi-hole.net/
- Network-wide ad blocking
- Privacy
Hardware
- I spent about $350 and have had it 2 years so far
- Renting from Comcast - $180/yr ($15/month)
Modem
- Arris SURFboard Cable Modem
Router
- ASUS AC3100 Dual-Band WIFI Router
DNS
- Raspberry Pi + SD card
Setup steps
- https://github.com/dfithian/pi-hole-setup
- Get the equipment
- Do the install
- Turn on DNS-over-HTTPS
- 30 minutes total
Stats
- At least 20% of the internet is ads/trackers
Stats
- TVs track you
- Move TV is Sling, Conviva is streaming CDN
With Pi Hole
With Pi Hole
Without Pi Hole
Without Pi Hole
Takeaways
- The internet is much more than just 20% full of ads, it is more like 80%
- DNS only blocks the first level
- How much of my bandwidth is being used to serve content I didn't request?
- How much of it am I paying for, like on my cell phone bill?
Caveats
- Can't browse everything
- I couldn't find out what scorecardresearch.com was on my WiFi
- Sometimes people want to click on ads
- Google airfare deals
- Instagram ads
- Some things are designed poorly
- JetBlue website doesn't work
- Can't always log in to apps on my Roku
Bonus: WiFi guest networks
- Keep your family happy
- Need different SSIDs with different DNS
- 1 hour total
- https://github.com/dfithian/pi-hole-setup#multiple-wlans
- https://wiki.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Multiple_WLANs
Bonus: Admin panel debugging
Bonus: High Availability
- Get two RaspPi's, install Pi Hole on both of them, and point DNS at them. HA is built in!