Banishing the ads, setting up a PiHole for my network. Finally!


This is the beginning of a project that I have been planning to do for years. A couple years ago I wanted to buy a Raspberry Pi during a sale event and ended up purchasing a RasPi Zero W. This was a very enticing option as it was only about $10 with both Bluetooth and WiFi capabilities. While I have had a lot of fun with the Zero in the past and have plans with it in the future, it was a suboptimal choice for wanting to run a PiHole. It features an underwhelming chip and only WiFi capabilities. PiHole is not a particularly intense workload, but I would prefer to have a system that I can add other features too without slowing anything down. The 3B+ seemed like a great fit for this! Lets go down a quick tangent on what a PiHole is. PiHole is open source software that lets you use a systems as a custom DNS. This custom DNS blocks ads at the request level, this is a HUGE difference to traditional ad-blockers. This also provides a performance and load time increase as you don't have to wait for responses from the ad providers. I will update this with screen shots shortly. I have the PiHole set up and ready to go, all that I need to do is refactor my local network and set the DNS on my router to the PiHole. I will post screenshots of these as it progresses.