Help with setting up a PiHole - I would like to become worthless to tech companies!
Hey all,
I've been using adblockers since the very early days they were available as Firefox Plugins, but the recent report on LG Smart TVs listening in, gathering device info, and sending it home has motivated me to do something at the level of my router.
I've got a Smart TV that's never been connected to the internet, but I want to cover all my bases. Same with my car, potentially, and the washing machine. I want to stop this crap at the source.
I've tried looking at the Pi-hole documentation but I'm confused already. I'm on MacOS and pretty comfortable using Terminal, and a Netgear Nitehawk AX2400 router.
Is it as simple as purchasing a Raspberry Pi device and then I'm good to go, or are there other things I need to buy before I jump in?
I'm sorry if this sounds stupid. I'm jealous of everyone on Tildes saying how their Pi-hole mostly protects them, and I'm so angry at this endless stream of data mining and sending it back to corporations I haven't consented to.
Yes, you just need a Raspberry Pi, or, in fact, basically any device that can connect to a network. Raspberry Pis are crazy expensive nowadays so probably better to get something else. You just install PiHole and set the device as your DNS server in your router settings. You should also check out AdGuard Home, which is basically the same thing but with a nicer UI.
Please note though, that DNS blocking is not a panacea and is pretty easily bypassable. It's more useful for ad blocking than for privacy. For example, Smart TVs usually hardcode their own DNS server, bypassing your filter, so you need some extra WiFi configuration to force them to use your server. Also, many devices nowadays use DNS-over-HTTPS/TLS, which is more secure, but also means Pi-hole can't block the requests. The only way to resolve this is to completely block DoH DNS resolvers like Cloudflare DNS and Google DNS (this is also explained in the post linked above). Both of those solutions require custom firewall rules, so it depends on if your router supports that.
Lastly, anyone can bypass your DNS blocklists by just directly making requests directly to an IP, or by serving ads/tracking from the same domain name as their main service, for example using
https://EvilTV.com/spywareinstead ofhttps://spyware.EvilTV.comwould mean Pi-hole has no way of blocking just the spyware requests.DNS blocking is a form of badness enumeration, which is not a good solution for privacy on its own. It's a useful convenience feature to not see any ads, but it doesn't achieve the goal of becoming "worthless to tech companies".
The only reliable way to stop the smart TVs from spying on you is to not buy a smart TV. For the washing machine, just don't connect it to the internet. You'll probably be fine without being able to start it from your phone.
+1 for not needing a Raspberry Pi. They're unfortunately a shadow of their former selves. Fine if you have an old one laying around, but not worth buying a new one. If you've got an old laptop lying around, use that instead. Or look into something like an Intel NUC or other small form factor PC because then you've got some headroom to run more on it. I have my primary pihole instance running on a proxmox server (and a secondary on an old pi I had collecting dust).
Meta: I'd love if we had a homelab community here on tildes. This would be the perfect place for this sort of question IMO. I mostly just miss /r/homelab.
I second I'd love a self hosted/homelab community here, I think it's come up before but apparently we decided we can use the existing groups, we just need more threads I think and use tech. I'm currently specing out a proxmox box for my new place super exited to get stuck in.
I run a homelab and would also be super interested in forming a homelab community! Good advice and insight can be so hard to find. Having said that, I didn't realize that the "No major changes" announcement meant there wouldn't be new communities... that is disappointing. With that being said, I also spend a fair amount of time on Discuit and if enough people actually participated I think we could adopt the homelab Disc there. Tildes and Discuit are different, but the communities that form can be what we make them.
If people are interested let me know. I can try to mod for homelab, Im not usually super talkative but I can try to seed the disc with some good starter information.
https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/1vjt/any_significant_changes_to_tildes_are_extremely_unlikely
Any community you want will need to be in the context of what is already here. Having said that, I know for a fact that there are various people on tildes running their own homelabs and stuff.
We can still love to have another community though... ;)
I'm sure I'm not the first person to do this, but for anyone using a UDM Pro as your router, I wrote a script to do this.
As long as the pihole is connected to something between the internet and the modem/router, you can force all traffic via a firewall through it ... right?
As a broad principle, yes, but you're describing what is typically thought of as a "double NAT" situation. A PiHole can act as a router, if that's the router you want to use. But for most individuals, they use their router of choice, and a PiHole as a client on their LAN acting as the DNS server.
You're so not wrong!
I've been eying making a pihole for a couple years but feel too overwhelmed with the lack of concrete information (well, information like I was a five-year-old). Also, time/attention span is something that I find I'm having more trouble dealing with heh...
https://www.smarthomeperfected.com/pi-hole-setup-guide/ is one of the sites I'd recently been eyeing. It still doesn't hold your hand much at all, for example, of all of the following instructions (aka, the first step) in
I know how to flash an SD card, image it, and how to boot it on ethernet. Set a hostname and enable SSH? Give it a fixed address? I'm guessing/hoping the official imager helps with setting those up, but I don't know. Also I suck at networking - I understand all those terms but don't know how to actually do the things. But at least I understand what will need to be done.
Overall, it seems like a lot of me googling (or DDGing/searXing in my case EDIT: today I found out searx is gone :( ) for me to succeed, and ADD is likely to kick in.
Thank you for starting this thread though, and hopefully others can chime in with info or better sites for us layfolk!
If you don't want to go down the pi route as they are expensive I used a Wintel W8 Pro box which I bought for £40.
It works really well and I didn't have to flash any SDCard as it has an internal drive.
Be aware a quick fix is to set your router DNS to a different IP than the ISP default. Have a look at quad9 for instance (9.9.9.9)
You need any computing device that can run Linux and can be connected to the Internet, preferably wired. A lot of people are praising refurbished Dell Optiplex workstations as good homelabs, though I don't have experience with one. I am not recommending you do this, but I had an old cheap TV box laying around. I installed Armbian on it and from there it was a matter of installing PiHole as a systemd service and configuring my router to not act as a DHCP server and let the PiHole do that, advertising itself as the only DNS server to devices connected to my network. This setup has been chugging along in my attic for months now with very little maintenance necessary. I also run Jellyfin on it and some other services.
I realize a lot of that may sound like gibberish to a beginner, but the individual concepts are not that complex and learning all of this was pretty rewarding. Just be prepared to do a lot of reading and digging into rabbit holes.
As much as I dislike AI, it's usually pretty good at helping with basic Linux and networking questions. Maybe it can help you get started (I recommend using duck.ai if you do pick this route).
I used pi-hole for a while then I moved over to NextDNS. (Side note: their website is intermittently having trouble atm, the DNS is working fine though). I use the website plenty, this just seems to be today Oct 4 2026). Of course, with NextDNS you're trusting them as your DNS provider, but I trust them more than my ISP or a big tech company. So the combo of an alternative DNS provider + ad-blocking was perfect for me.
They seem to have a decent privacy policy also. It's a small fee ($20) annually (free up to a certain # of requests with all features available) and gives me plenty of control. So you can try it out free as a test if you want. The free plan includes 300,000 queries/month (keep in mind tons of devices can query DNS many times a day, so this sounds like a lot but depending on your network can be gone through quicker than you think)
My router is set to NextDNS's DNS servers and network-wide I get ad-blocking. They also have many other settings and toggles you can enable/disable. You can disable logging, you can whitelist/blacklist, they have a lot of other "tricks" they can do to help block common telemetry/tracking stuff.
My favorite thing is you can add ad-block lists to NextDNS just like you can in things like uBlock Origin. You can add as few or as many adblocking lists as you like and tailor it exactly how you want it.
Then, if I need to disable NextDNS temporarily for my browser to test anything or whatnot, I just set my browser's DNS differently temporarily to override what my PC is setting from the router, and refresh, etc, and then switch back when I'm done. I specifically set NextDNS in my browsers too as a DNS-over-HTTPS endpoint, which might be overkill but I want to ensure the more private/secure protocol is happening.
I don't mind pi-hole as an option, I just wanted something even easier and to free my RPis up for other projects
Separately, an "easier" way I can recommend for pi-hole setups is to use a distro like DietPi (though I can't remember if this automatically goes to a GUI desktop or not), which is a lightweight linux OS made for Raspberry Pi devices (they also make it for x86/regular PCs so you can use a miniPC or whatever else) and DietPi's setup wizard actually includes a number of features / common use cases you can just check a box for in the installer and have it do a lot of the setup for you. I have set up Pi-hole and print servers this way. Boot DietPi, select a few things in the startup/install wizard and off to the races. I think it even walked me through the whole pi-hole setup- asking which network interface to use, etc. --- there's still some stuff to think about from a techie angle- like making sure your router has a reservation for the pi-hole so it's IP doesn't change- that way you don't lose your DNS when it reboots because of your router DHCP giving it a different address, etc.