” A black hole for Internet advertisements”. I’ll vouch. The amount of DNS blocks I’ve seen and how much snappier everything loads and runs has been an amazing improvement. PiHole is a software primary built for a Raspberry Pi 3 (or 2 I believe) and blocks known DNS entries of advertisers and trackers. It was a quick project to implement and has been working like a charm since.
I went the easy route on this one: I spun up a template VM for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and ran the installer from the GitHub website. This allows a one stop installer that just handles everything and made this super easy. Website: https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole
After setting this server up, pushing my DHCP server to push all non-static traffic to the PiHole and doing a bit of testing, I was pleasantly surprised. I have yet to find a single non-working website or DNS access problem. All my Amazon and Android devices work without issue despite the logs of all the blocks on the PiHole display.
The dashboard is wonderful. It’s also fun to leave up and watch the requests hit:
The VM is dual core with 1GB of RAM. This was needed due to the network speeds and internet speeds at home (Gigabit ftw). I’ll keep this running from now on most likely. Be sure to check out their homepage for more info!