How to up your security with less than $50
I recently came across Pi-Hole a network level ad blocker. I was intrigued by it so I decided to give it a try.
So, I ordered the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ to try it out.
- Raspberry Pi 3B+
- 32GB Sandisk Extreme Plus Micro-SD card
- Display (any Raspberry Pi display will work for this project, and you can use HDMI monitors too)
- Micro-USB cable
- Power supply
- Case (optional)
- Ability to flash your SD card (try balenaEtcher!)
Software required
Just to make things easier, I decided to go with Raspbian Stretch with desktop and recommended software
Flashing the Mirco SD
Once the flashing process has completed, insert your SD card into the Raspberry Pi and connect the power supply.
Boot up Raspberry pi and update the raspberry OS then start terminal and login as sudo and run following command
curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash
Select Cloudflare because it is faster than any other DNS providers.
Pi-Hole does not have its own blocking list. It uses third party lists. By default StevenBlack is selected, if you want more lists you can add in this step
I strongly recommend to choose both protocols IPv4 and IPv6
Finally, confirm the network and static IP details. Gateway IP shown here is the router’s IP address, which Pi-Hole installer should pull automatically.
Next, you will see a warning on IP conflict in case Pi Hole receives the same IP address as another device on your network. With modern routers, this should be a rare occurrence
Then, you will an option to enable Pi-Hole web interface, which I strongly recommend.
Query logging gives you all the cool statistics about how many requests were blocked, etc.
Voila! you are done. You can login to Pi-Hole web interface and use the temporary shown on the terminal screen.
If you need more info you can check out https://pi-hole.net/
