If you think a pi-hole is a hole in your face that you put food into, this is the post for you.
The political advertising over the last few weeks has pushed me over the edge and finally gotten me to implement the Pi-hole project.
The Pi-hole project is a free (but supported by users) application that runs on linux and provides network wide ad blocking. The blocking is done via a dns sinkhole, which redirects DNS requests for blocked URLs. Because it is DNS based it will work on any device running on the network it is configured on. Your laptop? Yep. That free game with ads in it on your phone? Yep. It even works on some smart TV ads. The only spot it won’t work is when the ads are served by the same domain as wanted content (ie. Youtube)
The Raspberry Pi is one of the most popular pieces of hardware to run it on, but given how hard it is to purchase a Pi right now, you might want to explore other hardware. It will run on most Linux installs. I’ve deployed it on a $40 Libre Computer AML-S905X-CC. If you can use linux, the setup is simple, and even if you haven’t used linux it is still doable.
After running it for a few hours, I can say this project is 100% worth it.
You get interesting data and granular control over blocking if you want it. $40 well spent.