Pi-hole: Day 1 (First 5 minutes)

Wow! This is so simple why haven't I been using this for years?

Pi-hole is a DNS blackhole server. It is so light weight it can run well on meager hardware such as a RasberryPi.

By default it pulls from various blacklist DNS sources, to help block the dns requests for many common and popular malware domains as well as ad-campaigns.

I had this up and running in about 5 minutes as a VM. I changed my DNS offering from my router's DHCP server to point to my new Pi-hole server. Using my phone I dis-associated and re-associated with my WiFi so it would received the new DNS offering. I immediately went to 2 sites that are notorious for banner and popup ads.

The first site's banner ads we gone!!! And the site seemed to load a bit quicker.

The second site I tested is notorious for pop-ups as well as banner ads. The banner ads were gone and when I invoked a popup it quickly disappeared off screen. (This isn't a feature of Pi-hole but a result of the DNS being blackholed)

The Pi-hole dashboard immediately registered the requests. The below screenshot came directly after my two connectivity tests from above within about 5 minutes of being up and running.

Also, I went ahead and turned DNS forwarding on and I chose the Quad9 DNS (9.9.9.9). I've heard good things about it. I've tested reachability to it and it tends to be a bit quicker than Google's 8.8.8.8. Quad9 also has the added benefit of being security and privacy focused. I used OpenDNS in the past but was turned off when Cisco bought it (personal preference).

Pi-hole is Free and Open Source but please consider making a donation: https://pi-hole.net/donate/

There is a pretty large Pi-hole user base as the project is already a few years old. There are many things to tune if you choose to do so. You can also find curated DNS blacklists out there from the users groups, that might be worth adding a resource.

Personally I'm interested in the log retention of Pi-hole and are there any ways to forward the logs to log collector or database to allow the investigation of DNS queries outside of Pi-hole.

I'll do a follow-up post in a few weeks after I let this run on the network for a while. So check back.