Pi = Raspberry Pi minicomputer
Hole = blackholing or null-routing a bad IP address
pi-hole = A fantastic, open source solution to advertisements and website tracking
Almost every single website you go to inundates you with advertisements. I don’t buy Michael Kors purses, why the heck am I getting ads for purses? Because my girlfriend does, and five minutes ago she sent me an email from her GMail account about her going shopping this afternoon and intends to drop off her purse for repair while she’s out.
I can’t get her off of GMail, the least I can do is not see that advertising junk while I use the ‘net.
This is where Pi-hole shines. It can run on any computer, such as that old laptop you were about to throw away or a tiny and cheap “Raspberry Pi” computer. Install Linux – any version – on the old machine, become root and then run a single command: curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash
This command downloads the latest installation script and sends it to the BASH shell processor. Give it five minutes and it’s finished, every step is automatic.
Now set the DNS for all the computers in your house to the IP address of this new Pi-hole machine, and that’s it, advertisements go away. You’ll also find your internet speed is a bit faster than it was before.
How does it work?
- You make a web request, www.google.com
- Pi-hole looks up www.google.com and sees that the computer on the other end is not a known advertiser. It provides the address quickly and you’re there.
- You do a search, let’s say for “presidential election 2016”. You get a ton of hits, you pick and click.
- Pi-hole looks up the internet address for the site you clicked on and sees one page, but it’s comprised of content from over 50 other computers. It does a database check and sees 70% of them are known advertisers
- It gives you the address for the web page you asked for, but all those known advertisers are 127.0.0.1 – localhost – you – yourself. On the sidebar you see very little because the browser thinks the advertisement is already loaded.
- You read on, doing your research or “reading the paper” unhindered by flashing crap in your sidebar.
- Internet access is faster because a) you’re hauling less dirt from the website, and b) Pi-hole does DNS requests from cache and concurrently; if the IP isn’t already cached, it’ll query multiple DNS hosts simultaneously and the first one to arrive is used.
Your shiny new Windows 10 operating system “phones home”, telling Microsoft every single time you power up your computer and shut it down, how you use your computer, what software you have and in some circumstances, what websites you visit. With Pi-hole installed all that data is blackholed, never making it out the wire.
I commend the developers of Pi-hole and especially their choice to make it open source. It’s something everyone should have in their house.