Setting up Pi-hole

Got mine running in an Ubuntu 16.x LTS server VM on my Gen 8 Microserver, had some minor static ip issues but resolved these - a very happy chappy indeed :)
 
My installation seems a bit unhappy. There's an update available but computer says no:

Code: 
root@rapihole:~:$ pihole -up
/opt/pihole/update.sh: line 29: /opt/pihole/COL_TABLE: No such file or directory
root@rapihole:~:$


I've done a pihole -r to repair but no luck. I'll probably reinstall the Pi from scratch, it'll be quicker than trying to fix this.
 
What devices are you using Pi-Hole on? I think I've just managed to get it up and running correctly. I have it running on my redundant pi 2 connected directly to router. My PC and mobile phone were the obvious choices but I use a VPN on my PC so changing the DNS to point to the Pi will be pointless as my VPN provider will change it to their settings yeah? I have to assign the DNS manually on each device as couldn't find the open in my BT router to do it for me.
 
I'm running it on a Pi 3.

The BT Homehub doesn't give you much control over the DHCP server but Pi-Hole has a DHCP server included so you could disable DHCP on the HH and use the Pi-Hole instead.
 
the-evaluator said:
I'm running it on a Pi 3.

The BT Homehub doesn't give you much control over the DHCP server but Pi-Hole has a DHCP server included so you could disable DHCP on the HH and use the Pi-Hole instead.
Click to expand...

Ah right will see if I can figure it out. I had to use raspbian jessie lite as only had a 4GB sd card spare. When I say what devices I mean what do people have connected to pi-hole. Like pc, phone, console etc. I just wasn't very clear what I meant. Just not sure if my VPN will overrule any DNS settings I set on my network.
 
Ahh. I've got all sorts. Games consoles, phones, tablets, laptops, Amazon echos, smart plugs.. all sorts. Everything at home is using it.

Chances are the VPN would override what DNS server your PC gets from your desktop but depending on how the VPN works you may be able to overide the DNS server that you'll get from VPN and tell it to use the Pi-Hole.
 
I wonder if I could block Spotify adds? Got my PC pointing to pi-hole so going to give it a go. The free version does me fine apart from them. I have PIA for a VPN and it just appears as an extra network adapter. It lets me change the DNS settings on it but then it won't let me browse the web.
 
maj said:
I wonder if I could block Spotify adds? Got my PC pointing to pi-hole so going to give it a go. The free version does me fine apart from them. I have PIA for a VPN and it just appears as an extra network adapter. It lets me change the DNS settings on it but then it won't let me browse the web.
Click to expand...

I think it does. I tried mine and didn't get any ads.
 
Evilpaul said:
In your router configuration set the primary DNS to be the IP of your Pi-Hole and set the secondary DNS to be an external DNS like your ISP, Google, OpenDNS, etc.
Click to expand...

I'm in the DNS part of my VM router/modem and I can't see where I can enter in a primary / secondary DNS. Does anyone else here have a VM Superhub, and know how you enter in the Pi-Hole's DNS?

yHMvg75.png
 
Sp00n said:
Don't think you can on the superhub, disable dhcp on the superhub and enable it on the pi.
Click to expand...

Thanks!

I did that - turned DHCP off on the Superhub, then enabled it on the Pi. I also set the Pi's address in Windows networking DNS settings as 1st choice, then Google DNS as the backup / 2nd choice.

Next, I disabled uBlock Origin, and pretty much all of the adverts are still gone :-)

Just Youtube plays pre-roll video adverts now which is damn annoying as they're between 1 minute and 3+ minutes long, so I got shot of those using a Greasemonkey script:

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/9165-auto-close-youtube-ads
 
My Pi-hole setup is probably a little unusual so I thought I'd share it.

I wanted to be sure that even if the Pi fell over, I'd still be able to access the internet and be clean of adverts. If I told my router just to use one Pi-hole for DNS then if it stopped working for any reason then the internet would fail. If I told my router to use a public DNS server as a secondary then if the Pi stopped working then everyone would get adverts.

I built a second Pi-hole. The nice thing about Pi-hole is that it runs perfectly well on a Raspberry Pi Zero so I used one of those.

My main internet router has four ethernet ports.

Two of them go to switches, one goes to my network monitor and there's nothing in the final port.

My two Ubiquiti access points are connected into different switches and I have one Pi-hole per switch as well.

If either Pi fails, all DNS requests will go via the other. If either switch fails, all the wireless devices will connect to the othr access point and use the other Pi-hole. My network monitor will email me to tell me what device(s) have failed.

Obviously if the main router fails then eveything stops working, there's nothing I can do about that but I do have a third Pi monitoring my overall internet connection so if it can't access the internet, it force reboots the router.

It's not a bad setup :)
 
I fixed my FTL problem. Turns out common sense. Pi-Hole using Lightpd didn't like running on my server that was also running cacti & nagios with Apache.
Re-installed pi hole onto it's own VM and we're grand.
 
Slightly off-topic, but if I was to install OpenVPN on a Pi, can it run on the same Pi that is running Pi-Hole or will I need 2 Pis to run them separately? Since Pi-Hole acts as a DNS server, will there be any complications with regards to DNS over a VPN?

Currently using a Pi 2 to run the Pi-Hole, and have got an original Pi Model B as a spare but it might not be powerful enough?

Back on-topic, I'm a very pleased user of Pi-Hole having used it for 2 weeks now :-)
 
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