Block ads on your network with Raspberry Pi and pi-hole

Brilliant article - useful additional comment at the end on a subtlety. A very simple how-to, and I may get hold of a Pi and just do it.

The way the author recommends is probably not optimal but it has an advantage which will sadly appeal to some. If we, the one who set the thing up, suddenly falls over and dies, which some of us are more at risk of than others, done as the author suggests, all they have to do is unplug the Pi. Done the way the comment suggests I think they would have to get their hands dirty with something that will be like learning Mandarin for them. So though its not optimal, I'll probably do as the author has suggested.

While it's a good idea to do, you don't need a pi. I installed dnsmasq on a computer that's always on and downloaded a hosts file. The web interface looks to be a nice touch.

You can also do it locally on most operating systems. It's worth rooting your android phone to pit install the hosts file for when you are roaming.

@cybertao: Same here; dnsmasq is on our gateway/firewall.

I also added an 'adcatch' to our network: another server on our network got an ip alias (eth0:0 at 192.168.1.253) supporting an apache virtual-host. With all the localhost ip#'s in that hosts file changed to that ip#, local browsers get immediate 404's instead of long timeouts and I get logging of all those bogus GETs in the virtual-host's error-log. It's disappointing, just how many sites that interest my gamer sons want them to fetch in a tracking pixel.

for android mobile phones there is DNS66 ( https://f-droid.org/packages/org.jak_linux.dns66/ ) which acts like a VPN to capture all traffic and filter out the ad-requests. that way it works without root on any phone.

greetings, eMBee.