Stuff a Pi-hole in your router because your browser is about to betray you

HELLFIRE

https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/08/pi_hole_6_flyby/ -- Mozilla sells ads, Google limits blocking them – it's time for stricter measures

... In the last year, you could be forgiven for feeling that web browser suppliers are actively working to make us trust them less. Last year, Mozilla bought an ad company; this month, it removed its promise not to sell your info. Meanwhile, Google is nearing the end of the process of turning off the extension system that uBlock Origin uses. It's gone from Chrome 134, which came out the same day as Firefox 136. Once Chrome updates, you must either switch to the less-capable uBlock Origin Lite or an equivalent, or lose ad-blocking altogether. This also goes for anything based on this or subsequent versions of Chrome, such as Microsoft Edge. While downstream vendors may be able to keep the older Manifest V2 around for a while, sooner or later, they face the choice of updating to a newer version of Chromium and dropping it, or forking Chromium's 45-million-line codebase. Enter Pi-hole (a play on pie hole, which is the American English for the British cake hole – mainly used when telling someone to close it). Pi-hole takes over as your network's name server, and silently redirects all web requests to known ad-server addresses to a DNS sinkhole. Everything else is passed upstream to the public DNS server of your choice. Only requests for ads silently fail, and the rest of the page loads as normal. The result is you see fewer ads. ...

Sharing out of networking interest.

Regards

cypherstream

HELLFIRE I had AdGuard home on opnsense and it was just a hassle. Apps on phones or tv boxes would be broken and it was a constant battle to scour through logs to unblock things. Even then I’d get something to work then a few days or a week later it was broken again, trying to access trackers and ads on other servers that I would have to unblock again.

I switched to Firefox when Google made the announcement. At work I’ve been using edge a lot too which I have uBlock installed.

egeezer

HELLFIRE
I have a couple of Raspberry Pi sitting around, may try it.
I wonder if it will break some of my Roku and Android music streaming apps.

bighorn1

egeezer
You should be fine with apps as long as you don’t overdo with lists. I use default by StevenBlack, 2 by Hagezi, 2 by Firebog and 5 local ones that I curated myself. No problems. Pi-Hole v6 also supports whitelists, if you don’t won’t to manually ad domains to be whitelisted.
You can also watch queries live and see if you have to unblock domain or two for particular website or app.
Pi-Hole is definitely worth the effort.

mmmdonuts

Brave Browser FTW. Then add your choice of Hagezi block lists to your DNS forwarder. Or install one then add the lists.

https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists

bennor

If one is using an Asus router that supports Asus-Merlin firmware, one can try to run Pi-Hole directly on the router:
https://www.snbforums.com/threads/pi-hole-directly-on-the-router-yes.90719/
https://github.com/jacklul/entware-pi-hole#installation

Otherwise there are other Asus-Merlin addon script ad blocking options like AdGuardHome and Diversion:
https://www.snbforums.com/threads/release-asuswrt-merlin-adguardhome-installer-amaghi.76506/
https://www.snbforums.com/threads/diversion-5-0-the-router-ad-blocker-released-december-30-2023.88244/

Use Firebog’s checked list on my Raspberry Pi’s running Pi-Hole and Unbound. The Hagezi lists seems to be the latest hotness for block lists so will look into them as well. Currently using Jacklul’s Pihole-Updatelists to pull in Firebog’s checked lists weekly.
https://github.com/jacklul/pihole-updatelists

PS: Don’t have an issue streaming media using Roku or Amazon FireStick with the Firebog checked list of block lists on the Pi-Hole’s.

taraf

wouldn’t put it past Google to hard code 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 using DoH in their browser….

Only option is to de-google your browsing experience. Firefox has its own problems, but it’s the only “major” browser left that isn’t based on the Chromium code base. You can switch to IceCat or ZenBrowser, which are based on Firefox too.

Running a pihole is also possible on a Mikrotik router, as it’s possible to get Docker running under RouterOS. But if you’re using Mikrotik you probably already have a NAS or other host in your network that can run containers, too. 🙂

brydry

Just installed pi-hole on my Proxmox machine yesterday and removed the ad-block extensions from the browsers. Browsing sure seams faster when loading web pages. Just using the default block list for now as I learn how to configure. I’m being cautious as I don’t won’t to break any sites we use. For now I have my pc and laptop, wife’s laptop dns pointed to the pi-hole Linux container. I’ll change the cable modem/router dns settings soon so everything on the network goes through the pi-hole. The wife even noticed it was faster so I know I’m on to something. LoL