Pihole on a raspberry pi

Pihole on a raspberry pi – making a network wide advert blocker with a raspberry pi.

I have a router using dnsmasq with adblocking setup on my router.
I also have a raspberry pi (which was being used as a retropi machine). I also have a Pizero. My retropi setup is moved to my pizero, leaving my PI with nothing to do.

PiHole sounds like an awesome little project, so this post is a Sunday afternoon spent turning my PI into a network wide advert blocker using piHole (and doing the setup from a mac.)

Pihole on a raspberry pi

1) Download raspian and install it onto an SD card – install instructions are here:

Basically it goes:

  • insert SD card
  • open disk utility
  • format SD card as MS_DOS (FAT)
  • find what disk your SD card is identified as
  • diskutil list
  • unmount SD card (but keep it plugged in)
  • diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2
  • open terminal
  • write image to SD card
  • sudo dd bs=1m if=raspbian-jessie-lite.img of=/dev/disk2
  • eject SD card
  • plug SD card into pi
  • boot pi

2) Enable SSH on boot

  • raspi-config
  • advanced > ssh
  • Enable

3) Set a static IP address

This used to be in /etc/network.interfaces
Now its in /etc/dhcpd.conf

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=140252

Pihole on a raspberry pi

4) Download pihole (https://pi-hole.net)
curl -L https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

Run through the install and configure your pi to use a static IP address

5) Log in to your router and change your main DNS server to the static IP address of your pi

Thats it – all machines on your network are now using your Pihole on a raspberry pi as their dns and adverts are being blocked!

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