Blocking ads with pihole

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date: 2023-02-23 16:46:40

categories: privacy

firstPublishDate: 2021-04-10 14:49:31

I have been using

pi-hole

for a few years and I'm happy with it. It blocks ads and trackers for all my devices on my home network,

I installed pi-hole on an unused raspberry pi 3 following the simple steps on

https://pi-hole.net

https://pi-hole.net

, basically the steps are:

install pi-hole on the raspberry pi

configure the internet router to forward the dns requests to the raspberry pi

After the initial setup, there is almost no maintenance to do, the block lists are automatically updated.

How does it work? Pi-hole has lists of server names serving ads and when a device browses to a page with ads, the device asks for the ip address of the ads server for example 'doubleclick.net' and the dns server in pi-hole responds with a dummy ip address and nothing is downloaded from the ads server.

I have an old ipad 2 and with pi hole the pages load way faster than without, it makes my ipad 2 usable again.

I watch the french news on

https://www.francetvinfo.fr/replay-jt/

https://www.francetvinfo.fr/replay-jt/

and recently the page changed and I was not able to watch the videos anymore. After debugging, I found that pi-hole blocked `sdk.privacy-center.org` and that this server is required to be able to watch the videos. So I added `sdk.privacy-center.org` to the whitelist in pi-hole using the web interface and now I can watch the french news again.

I recently noticed that some legetimate sites are added to the block lists, causing issues on these sites. I also have wifi issues, my devices get disconnected. When a site doesn't work:

I check that my device is online and can access other sites

I check the logs in pihole, if I see something a domain related to the site I'm trying to access, I add it to the allow list.

hashtags: #privacy

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