In preparation for the new home, and my plans to improve overall the new networking, I have implemented a virtual server running Pi-Hole. Functionally, Pi-Hole is a software tool that attempts to block all advertisements, similar to a web browser adblocker, except it can be used to block all traffic from all devices on the network. Thus it can also eliminate ads on Roku or cell phone devices, which typically can’t load adblockers. Functionally, this also removes adds from YouTube and similar platforms.
In my case, I opted for a virtual machine running on my home FreeNAS server, but this can be done with a Raspberry Pi or any spare computer. The hardest part is really finding the basic software that matches your environment. For me, that meant loading Ubuntu 20 server on a virtual machine (which had its own technical challenges on the current FreeNAS version). Once that is completed though, the install of Pi-Hole was only 5 or 6 commands, and it was up and running.
Normally, you would then point your home router to the Pi-Hole service for DNS, instead of its default of your ISP. That then will automatically update all devices on the network (which use your router for their DNS), for the same benefit (including Roku and cell phone devices). Pi-Hole then uses public lists to filter any traffic and remove any advertisement sites. Non-filtered traffic works just fine. To the end user, the appearance is at worse a blank field on the website where the add used to be, but in most cases, websites simply re-adjust and appear without gaps.
In our case, the configuration is slightly more complicated – since I am tying into the in-laws network, my router doesn’t really control DNS. I don’t want to change the home router, since it isn’t mine (and would then break when we move) and because I could not easily locate the setting. Instead, I had to manually change the DNS server setting on each specific device, rather than a central location. This means a lot of separate changes (which will need to be reset post-move), but keeps the home network connection intact.
Since Pi-Hole has been running over the last few days, it has cataloged an average of 20% of traffic being blocked across 20 or so devices. This not only makes the user experience much nicer (no more popups or ads), but also slightly improves speed (since no ad data is being downloaded). So far, I am very happy with this software and the impact.
For the new home, I will likely move this over to a Raspberry Pi, if only because I am not fond of VMs on our home theatre PC (due to potential performance issues). Raspberry Pi’s are cheap and easy to implement, and are more than powerful enough to run this simple software.
Full credit to the inspiration for this project, although with the rapid change in technology the process (at the FreeNAS level) was a bit outdated:
