Pi-hole VS pihole-regex

One of my favorite uses of a Raspberry Pi computer is Pi-hole. Which is promoted as a network-wide advertisement blocker. By installing Pi-hole on a RPi and attaching said device to your home LAN, a whole new world of OSINT and self-quantification is opened up.

Time to set up Pi-Hole on my Rapsberry Pi 4

https://pi-hole.net/

Tools like https://pi-hole.net does this for the whole house. It comes with a default set of blocked domains and you can easily add to it. It acts as your local DNS for the network.

Pi-hole (Docker Tag 2024.07.0 Pi-hole v5.18.3 FTL v5.25.2 Web Interface v5.21) configuration

https://pi-hole.net/

Easier than you might think to set up. Set and forget. Do it for your family and friends maybe. Sell routers pre-configured maybe.

Not /the/ answer. Just one not-nothing step.

A Pi-hole instance to my network's DNS and block all ads in all devices at home

PiFi includes network-wide ad and tracker blocking (alongside Wireguard/OpenVPN client support and NAS features)

From my experience, pihole is very easy to setup for this use case: https://pi-hole.net/

> Home routers can simply assign pi into e.g. pi.home when doing dhcp. Then you can "ping pi" on all systems. It fixes everything- for that reason alone these reserved TLDs are, imo, useful. Unfortunately I've never seen a router do this, but here's hoping.

dnsmasq has this feature. I think it’s commonly available in alternative router firmware.

On my home network, I set up https://pi-hole.net/ for ad blocking, and it uses dnsmasq too. So as my network’s DHCP + DNS server, it automatically adds dns entries for dhcp leases that it hands out.

There are undoubtably other options, but these are the two I’ve worked with.

Thinkpad 431s if you are on a low budget. It's the best performing cheap option, IMO.

Obviously block access to internet nonsense. I just started using ControlD.com and it works like a charm. Or, if you have the time, make the PiHole and your Home Lab & Network Lab a project that you two build together.

Make the command line kid friendly, like using bat instead of cat and LSD instead of ls and so on. Colors are stimulating and fun. Something like the hyper terminal is another idea.

I would appreciate someone building a faster alternative to the hyper terminal in C or Rust.

And then there's Nand to Tetris, which you should pick up together as well.

[0] https://controld.com/

[1] https://pi-hole.net/

[2] https://www.nand2tetris.org/

There are wrappers for updating regex lists that can be modified with other URLs. This was floating around for a while: https://github.com/mmotti/pihole-regex/blob/master/install.py and this is another method: https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/documentation/general/refreshing-piholes-regex-block-list-from-external-sources.html With enough regex tweaking I bet you could shave at least tens of thousands of lines off your list, and it could be divided into regex entries for domains where it makes sense, with the rest being non-regex domain entries. Simple regex that is functionally equivalent to AdBlock style wildcard blocks won't notably bog down the system either. It might take a few hours to get a workflow going to streamline producing such a list, but it can be done.

I also have a bunch of RegEx blacklisted from this pihole-regex/regex.list at master · mmotti/pihole-regex · GitHub and these:

Here's a list of domains I've used for years. All of which have been collected from different websites and sources such as https://firebog.net/ and https://github.com/mmotti/pihole-regex.

I also suggest these regex blocks

Your mileage may vary, but a combination of the default pi-hole list, the firebog.net lists (green, checkmark lists only), and the https://github.com/mmotti/pihole-regex/blob/master/regex.list do a pretty complete job for me.

While not perfect, and does not directly address the YouTube ads, I can suggest setting up mmotti's Regex Filters for Pi-hole.

I did also find these as well: https://github.com/mmotti/pihole-regex/blob/master/regex.list

Maybe this help: https://github.com/mmotti/pihole-regex