How to block annoying ads in your home network and keep your kids safe !!!

If you’re concerned about the privacy and security of your home network, you may want to consider using Pi-Hole. Pi-Hole is a network-wide ad blocker that can prevent ads and tracking scripts from loading on any device that connects to your home network. In addition to improving the performance of your network by reducing the amount of data that needs to be transferred, Pi-Hole can also protect your privacy by blocking requests to known tracking domains.

Let’s start with the benefits

Benefits of Using Pi-Hole

Pi-Hole offers several benefits for home network users:

1. Block Ads and Tracking Scripts: Pi-Hole can block ads and tracking scripts across your entire network, improving performance and privacy.
2. Network-wide Protection: Unlike browser-based ad blockers, Pi-Hole can block ads and tracking scripts on any device that connects to your home network.
3. Improved Network Performance: By blocking ads and tracking scripts, Pi-Hole can reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred, improving the performance of your network.
4. Customizable Blocklists: Pi-Hole allows you to customize the blocklists to block additional domains beyond the default ones.

What does it look like?

Here, take a look at my Yahoo Mail page

Before Pi-Hole: and then after Pi-Hole

Here is another example, for the CNN page today

Before Pi-Hole: and then after Pi-Hole

Intrigued how to get it started?

In this blog post series, I’ll walk you through the process of installing and configuring Pi-Hole on your home network.

Once it was done, my web UI, looks something like this

As you can see, the pi-hole has blocked more than 30K ad or unwanted website links at my home network just in the last 24 hours.

Before you begin, you will need

• A functioning Raspberry Pi
• Desire to make your home network safe
• Time

You will need to know

• Some basic networking knowledge, If you have very limited or no understanding of networking, it’s okay. I will try to outline the steps you need to perform
• Physical access to our router
• Access to admin credentials to your router

Installing Pi-Hole

I won’t repeat the good content that is already out there on Pi Hole website. Follow this link to get started. The entire process took less than an hour for me to finish

Home

After the Install

The DNS server setting is something that will NOT automatically change on your devices. So, you can do one of two things:

a) Restart the router so that all devices can get the new configuration, or

b) Wait until the device (like your cellphone) restarts or reconnects to your router. At which point, it will get the new config

More importantly, remember to visit the Pi.Hole webUI so you can monitor the pages that we being blocked. The stock installs already creates a block list. I manually added a few more lists that I found on gitHub to make my ad blocker even more robust. Keep in mind, there are a few pages that might get blocked that you don’t want to block. For example, if you would like WhatsApp to work but only block Facebook and TikTok, you can play around with custom white-lists or black-lists.

Hope this helps. Happy Safe Surfing!!!