PiHole for added protection

So as the whole Smart Home was winding down with stuff to do, I had to figure out more stuff to actually do, enhance my security, network, I encountered PiHole.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen it before, but was unsure, do I really need it? I mean, I have all kinds of blocking software in my machine (uBlock Origin for me). But since it’s really easy to install as a docker compose package, it was like, why not test and see how it works?

First time around the block

So as everyone knows by now, I use docker compose for everything. I want my host to stay pure and simple, and docker to do everything.

So installing PiHole was easy as, eating a pie? Just copy-paste a bunch of docker configurations from the internet, change your routers DNS address to your host machine, and your done?

  pihole:
    container_name: pihole
    image: pihole/pihole:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "192.168.0.10:53:53/tcp"
      - "192.168.0.10:53:53/udp"
      - "8080:80/tcp"
    environment:
      TZ: 'Europe/Helsinki'
      WEBPASSWORD: 'xxxx'
    volumes:
      - '/opt/pihole/config:/etc/pihole'
      - '/opt/pihole/dnsmasq.d:/etc/dnsmasq.d'

Was it really that easy? Of course not!

And yes, it just worked. I was quite pleasantly surprised actually, I had encountered some messages at Reddit how it’s not that good anymore, YouTube is embedding ads so you wont be able to block them on DNS level anymore.

But it was really, like, free? I mean, it took like 10 minutes of work and everything just, worked. And I was getting quite nice blocking amounts, something like 8% hit rates, which sounds really really good, for one piece of software?

But then came the problem, if you like to use Google and other services to seach stuff and see those nice images on top of the search results which you want to click, because they are what you are searching for.

So if you guessed it correctly, Pihole blocked all of those, because, Google and everyone else will absolutely track everything you do! Which makes using search engines, hard, because, you want to find stuff, but still not allow yourself be tracked?

So after a bit of going back and forth, I decided to remove it, and go back to using Cloudflare’s fast dns servers.

But the idea was still there, so how to go around it?

But still, Pihole is good, you can just install it, forget it exists, and it will do some nice magic for you. And the best part? It works on all of your traffic, not just things your browser’s extension happens to block.

And I really really liked that I was in control of our DNS, I like data, and if I’m in control of our DNS, I can see nice numbers, associate them with hosts, and see what happens. Will I actually do anything with them? No, of course not. But they are there, and if something big happens, and I happen to see it. It might be enough to give me the push to find out if something is wrong in our network. Or if there is nasty clients doing nasty things I was not aware of.

So I installed it again, with the same piece of code. Because, yes, I do tend to remove code I’m not actively using, otherwise they will start to gather dust, and maintenance worry.

And this time, I also added a bunch of adlists to the mix, growing the number of blocked dns addresses, just to make sure I’m being protected And I think I can end this with the latest results.

And what about the search engines? Well, we just try to live with it. Or bypass certain sites, case-by-case. But for the majority of our browsing habits. It’s there for now, again.

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