The Raspberry Pi series: Pi-hole

The Raspberry Pi series: Pi-hole 

 

Hello, this is Babae!

If you are still in lockdown, or looking for something new to learn, you should pick up a Raspberry Pi.

 

 

 

A Raspberry Pi is a single board computer that is capable of running your home automations, your home web server, and much more. The hardware on this device is not only impressive for the size, but also for its low price. For less than $100 CAD, you get a Pi with a quad-core processor, 8 GB ram, Bluetooth 5.0, dual band 802.11ac Wi-Fi, 4K60p micro HDMI output, gigabit ethernet, two USB 3.0, and two USB 2.0 ports.

 

 

 

You can choose from many flavors of Linux. Don't know Linux? This is a great opportunity to learn as installing the operating system is as simple as flashing the microSD card. Linux has a huge library of open source software, which is free to use. I will briefly tell you about a few of the software I use on my Raspberry Pi 4.

 

First, I am running a program called Pi-hole.

 

 

All of your devices that connect to the Internet looks up the IP address from the human-readable web address we enter on our browser in a domain name server (DNS). This is like when we look up a phone number from a phone book. It's easier for us to remember our friends' names than their phone number; the same is true for domain names. The computer cannot just "go to youtube.com" like we cannot just "go to Anna's house"; we need an address for Anna's house. So, when we type in Youtube.com on, our computer sends that to the DNS and get back an IP address that looks like "216.58.193.78".

When we visit a website, however, our computers are not just looking for the address we entered in the browser. The website will often embed content from external sources, such as a picture, or a video hosted on another website. Sometimes this is related to the content we are looking for, but other times, these are advertisements to sell you some goods or services.

As you can imagine, the website owner gives permission for these ads to be on their website, but they don't want these ads to take up storage space and bandwidth on their server. Likewise, the ad companies want to keep their own ads on their own website to allow for tracking and control. Speaking of tracking, companies do not only track advertisements but also your behavior on your computer. There are telemetry and tracking from even the software you trust on your computer - Windows, Mac OS, Office, etc.

 

Through a collaborative effort from users, there are many repositories of ad and tracking servers. When someone sees an ad, they put those domain name on a list. Over time, these lists have grown to have over hundreds of thousands of domain names.

When your computer sends the domain name of an ad on the website you are visiting to look for an IP address,

 Pi-hole intercepts the lookup and returns nothing. When nothing is returned to the browser, nothing gets displayed. Nothing being returned to the browser also means that you are not using your data bandwidth to retreive the ad. This also speeds up your web browsing experience as the bandwidth can be used for downloading the content you actually want to see.

It's 2020 now, and many people already use ad-blocking software like UBlock, AdBlock Pro, or AdGuard. These are great software as they work on your browser to intelligently look for ad content on the webpage and prevent them from being rendered. However, we don't just connect to the Internet from web browsers. Many of the free apps on your phone have ads. You might also get ads on your TV apps.

 

 

 The Pi-hole can block ads on all devices on your network when you put it between your devices and the gateway. On your router, you can set the Raspberry Pi's local address as the DNS and whenever a device is looking up domain, it would be sent to the Raspberry Pi. The Pi-hole program will check the domain name against the lists of ad servers and filter out the ads and tracking. Once the device receives the IP address of the content you are looking for, it will connect with the server directly through the gateway. As the domain name lookup is a very quick process, you won't even notice a difference in speed.

 

Setting up the Pi-hole is quite simple and there are many tutorials out there already. For more information on the Raspberry Pi or the Pi-hole, check out some of the links below. Also, you can feel free to leave your question in the comments and I will do my best to answer your questions.

 

Thank you,

 

 

 

www.raspberrypi.org/

Teach, Learn, and Make with Raspberry Pi – Raspberry Pi

pi-hole.net/

Home

이 포스팅은 한국어보다 영어가 편한 Babae 멤버가 적은 글입니다. 

 

질문과 댓글은 한국어로 남기셔도 괜찮으니 궁금한 점이 있으시다면 남겨주세요 :)

 

그럼 감사합니다.