Initial Thoughts on Setting Up a Pi Hole

Reading Time: < 1 minute
Today I installed Pi Hole on a Raspberry Pi 3 and configured it so that the router routes traffic through the Pi Hole before returning to the devices on my network. Installing Pi Hole on a Raspberry Pi 3 is relatively straight forward. Find the two or three lines of code, run them, and a minute or two later the device is ready and waiting.

You’re then asked to give the Pi a static IP address, and to modify the DHCP DNS listing so that traffic from the Swisscom router, in my cae, passes through the Pi Hole before arriving at the desired machine. I had to reboot the router to get traffic to go from the router to the Pi Hole and from the Pi Hole to the laptops and mobile phones. I write laptops but I have used just one laptop and mobile phone.

I thought that Pi Hole would block all ads but it doesn’t. If ads are servied by YouTube you’ll see them. Ads from swiss ad providers are still shown on Swiss newspaper sites. For Pi Hole to work best you would need to keep updating the list of hosts that you want to block. Since this requires Wireshark or Little Snitch it’s faster to use other ad blocking tools.

If you want to see a list of everything that is blocked by default you can check [this list](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts). At the time of writing this blog post the list was last updated in November of 2023.

## And Finally

Installing it is straightforward if you follow the instructionsl, but getting it to be useful requires an investment of time.