I ordered a Raspberry Pi 5 so I have a Pi 3 that’s about to be redundant. I haven’t used Pi-Hole so I was thinking it’d be good for that but I’m curious if there’s any downsides for users. Are sites blocked if you dont whitelist them? That sort of thing.
Basically, I’m not worried about me having issues but I’m worried about a maintenance headache if friends and family can’t access things.
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Just make sure you have port 53 and 80 open. I recently had some problems myself trying to get Pi-Hole up and running. I already had dnsmasq taking up port 53 for a wifi hotspot, which conflicts with Pi-Hole’s own DNS. Aside from that, hosting any websites can also conflict with Pi-Hole’s frontend.
If you aren’t using your Pi 3 for anything yet then I already assume this shouldn’t be a problem though.
Good luck and have fun setting up your Pi-Hole!
I’ve seen it cause issues when you try and use Google Analytics console. You can add white list entries to groups and then add devices to that group. Works well.
You’ll have to whitelist some Microsoft domains if you want to get achievements working for games that use a Microsoft account.
I can’t think of any problems I’ve faced in over 3 years. I have an app on my phone that I can use to temporarily disable my Pi-hole if I need to do some testing, but I don’t know if I’ve ever had a situation where the Pi-hole was the source of a problem. Definitely not a maintenance headache. I run an update on it every now and then, but only because I see a notification that there is one, not because there’s something going wrong.
My gf likes to click on ad entries of Google searches - that doesn’t work
That’s a feature, not a bug.
I know and I tell her that, too - it’s just something to consider when calculating the wife approval factor
Well, tell her that these ads can and often do contain malware, and as of recent have become even better at faking the real URL of a supposed service.
If you are able to (and allowed), install an AdBlocker (e.g. uBlock Origin) to reduce the friction for such cases. In my experience these ads are rarely click-worthy.
You have full control over what you block and whitelist. So if anything goes wrong, you can just troubleshoot it and whitelist if needed. If all fails, you can always (temporarily) turn off all blocking in pihole.
“PiHole Browser Extension” in Firefox is great for temporarily suspending the Pi-hole altogether and automatically re,-enabling it after a set amount of time. It’s especially handy if you run multiple Pi-holes for redundancy.
Nope, no issues.
There might be a chance for false-positives. Or to just clog your dns responses with repetitive queries.
Then again, you don’t need more than a HaGeZi blocklist anyway.
There’s a handful of lists at that link. Do you have a recommendation? Just their recommended multi pro list?
Been running it 7 years with a combined adlist of 1,089,320 domains.
It’s really rare that I run into a site that won’t load or function correctly (like once maybe twice a year). The most noticeable really is the ad results in Google, but I’ve moved away from that to DuckDuckGo anyway.
In the few cases that you do want to use a blocked doman; you can open pihole and either whitelist the domain with one click right out the query log, or disable pihole blocking entirely for 5sec-30min with one or two clicks.
If you really want to, you can group clients and adlists so some clients have much stricter blocking than others do. You can even leave some devices completely free of blocking while still using pihole to log their traffic.
By far one of the noisiest blocked domains is Nvidias driver telemetry. If you don’t strip it out using NVSlimmer, it’ll constantly retry its phone home, spamming the pihole with dns requests (not enough that it can’t handle, but enough that it’s VERY noticeable in the dashboard)
Could you point me at where to find a list of domains for Nvidia telemetry?
events.gfe.nvidia.com is the main one that gets spammed if it fails.
Just use NVSlimmer to strip it out entirely. (grab that and the latest driver package from Nvidia, repeat for updates)
Does a similar utility exist for Linux, though?
On my Windows system I’m using NV Cleanstall to prevent installing telemetry and other unnecessary bits in the first place. Quite the nice tool as well
Not that I’m aware of, but I haven’t looked for one either.
I manually added a handful of domains, and not a single one of them has been pinged so far. We’ll see
Important? Depends on who you ask, but annoying? Yes absolutely. I’ve found with both Pihole and Adguard Home that deal links posted on Slickdeals are broken. But those also redirect several times and it can be a bit cumbersome to whitelist all the domains.
I also found out recently that one (or more) of my blocklistsnin AGH was blocking Steam from uploading games saves. So I had to remove some.
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Hmm, any idea where? I’ve poked around quite a bit in general and haven’t found anything that looks like it would do that. But I’m happy to be wrong! :)
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Depending on how you configure it you can run into issues with sites and apps that use trackers.
Occasionally it’s caused some problems with the tracking crapware that the spouse’s company uses in their web platform. Since they work from home and it breaks the main site they use for work, I’ve had to add some exceptions.
I’ve also seen it occasionally cause problems on websites that rely on tracking garbage and outright fail when they’re blocked. Usually I just never go there again but in a few cases it’s been something I was forced to use so I just disable the pihole for five minutes, do what I need, and hope to never visit that site again.
I think there have been maybe eight of these occurrences in the past five years so it’s not a continual annoyance. No big deal and definitely worth it.
“eight of these occurrences”
I’ve been using various forms of adblock for many years. If a website refuses to show you the information it contains: the information it has is probably toxic garbage.
I’ve lived by “if it doesn’t load, I doesn’t need it” for over a decade and I’ve never encountered a problem I couldn’t easily solve better without the troublesome webpage.
If a website refuses to show you the information it contains: the information it has is probably toxic garbage.
Ehhh. I’ve seen a number of news websites that have a “turn off your ad blocker” thing, and I’d imagine that this could trip that. They aren’t malware sites.
90% of the time you can inspect element and then just delete it from the DOM.
Or drop into reader mode.
While I agree with the sentiment, it doesn’t really pan out for “complete this contract/form if you want to get paid” or “your job requires you to use our internal platform all day every day and we added click tracking to it but aren’t smart enough to make the site function when it’s blocked”
Wait wait wait. Your spouse doesn’t use a vpn for work? They rawdog your private, home network with it?
Amazing, isn’t it?
Lol. Do you know how many companies, even cyber security companies, that don’t use a VPN for remote workers? A lot sadly…
I do, and I will raise concers every time I hear about it
I use default block list and had 0 issues so far
FML I shouldnt wtite this lol. Just after my comment I found that Lichess app is giving servfail in query and doesnt work. Apparently its unbound issue, but still have to sort that out
I dont know what happened, but its working fine again. I guess unbound was tripping. Nvm me lol
Been using pi-hole since 2016 and I’ve had to make but a handful of exceptions over he years. I guess it’s a case by case thing.
If you use the default blocklists you might have no problem at all, if you go full bonkers with blocklists you might have to keep an eye on it sometimes and will mantain a whitelist of a handful of domains.
It is very painless.
