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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My gf likes to click on ad entries of Google searches - that doesn’t work
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.
Wait wait wait. Your spouse doesn’t use a vpn for work? They rawdog your private, home network with 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
Amazing, isn’t it?
Quite often, yes, especially for apps.
For nearly a year the Android Amazon app wouldn’t work. It would load, and then when a tracker failed to start, would show a generic error message page.
US bank mobile app wouldn’t login for about 2 months last year.
This happens quite often when apps are built with dependencies they assume will load, and when there is a failure an error boundary catches it and shows an error view.
I have not had either of these issues.
It heavily depends which filter lists you use obviously. I never had this issues and neither my family does
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.
Depends on what lists you add to pihole (or adguard).
The default lists for both are primarily advert or tracking related, and very safe to keep. The only time I whitelist is when I’m following some kind of shopping deal that uses a tracker. Most linux related things are free from that.
I have a pihole, I love it. My wife hates it so much I made her her own Wi-Fi network on her own vlan that’s isolated from the rest of the network and uses Google dns. My wife likes to click ads and watch TikTok and all that shit is blocked on my network
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?
I’m using AdGuard, which is pretty similar. I had issues with my Sonos speakers. The devices couldn’t find the speakers until I set a few servers on the whitelist.
Apart from that, all’s good.
Only if you like watching commercials on paramount +
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.
DNS blocking is heavily dependent on the blocklist(s) you use. It’s entirely possible to block >95% of crapware, and break companies’ ability to track you without compromising usability.
Having used both for a lot of years, I’d say look instead at AdGuard Home. It is also FOSS but supports more out of the box; including certificate management, the ability to use encrypted DNS both upstream and downstream without need for third party software (cloudflared), the ability to use adblock filter syntax (lists are 200k lines instead of 2 million lines, but actually block more), and so on. PiHole has some improvements pending in the next version, but it’s not there yet in comparison, imho.
I’d also strongly suggest you check out Hagezi’s DNS blocklists, as they’re pretty much set and forget. They’re intended to be used as your only block list, and do an excellent job (see testing in the Discussions on their GitHub). Use the Normal list if you don’t want to deal with false positives occasionally, and the Pro++ list if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty (whitelisting occasionally) and want to block every last scrap of annoyance and anti-privacy crapware on the web. Both will significantly improve your online experience.
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.
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.
