Pi-Holed…..


I have a love-hate relationship with ad blockers. On the one hand, I despise the obnoxious ads that are forced down our throats at what seems like every turn. On the other hand, I appreciate the need for publishers to earn a living so that I can consume their hard-earned work for free. Somewhere in the middle is a responsible approach. If they can do it in 140 characters and a link, I’m happy. That is all. No images. No video. No script. No HTML tags. No tracking.

 

Which brings me to Pi-hole. I’m going to keep the intro bits as brief as possible but, in a nutshell, Pi-hole is a little DNS server you run on a Raspberry Pi in your local network then point your router at such that every device in your home resolves DNS through the service. It then blacklists about 130k domains used for nasty stuff such that when any client on your network (PC, phone, smart TV) requests sleazy-ad-domain.com, the name just simply doesn’t resolve. Scott Helme put me onto this originally via his two excellent posts on Securing DNS across all of my devices with Pi-Hole + DNS-over-HTTPS + 1.1.1.1 and Catching and dealing with naughty devices on my home network. Go and read those because I’m deliberately not going to repeat them here. In fact, I hadn’t even planned to write anything until I saw how much difference the service actually made. More on that in a moment, the one other bit I’ll add here is that the Raspberry Pi I purchased for the setup was the Little Bird Raspberry Pi 3 Plus Complete Starter Kit:

Little Bird Raspberry Pi 3 Plus Complete Starter Kit

This just made it a super easy turnkey solution. Plus, Little Bird Electronics down here in Aus delivered it really quickly and followed up with a personal email and a “thank you” for some of the other unrelated stuff I’ve been up to lately. Nice 🙂

I went with an absolute bare bones setup which essentially involved just following the instructions on the Pi-hole site (Scott gets a bit fancier in his blog posts). I had a bit of a drama due to some dependencies and after a quick tweet for help this morning followed by a question on Discourse, I was up and running. I set my Ubiquiti network to resolve DNS through the Pi and that’s it – job done! As devices started picking up the new DNS settings, I got to see just how much difference was made. I set my desktop to manually resolve through Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 whilst my laptop was using the Pi-hole which made for some awesome back to back testing. Here’s what I found:

Let’s take a popular local Aussie news site, news.com.au. Here’s what it looks like with no Pi-hole:

news.com.au without pi-hole

In the grand scheme of ads on sites, not too offensive. Let’s look at it from the machine routing through the Pi-hole:

news.com.au with pi-hole

Visually, there’s not a whole lot of difference here. However, check out the network requests at the bottom of the browser before and after Pi-hole:

news.com.au network without pi-hole

news.com.au network with pi-hole.jpg

Whoa! That’s an 80% reduction in network requests and an 82% reduction in the number of bytes transferred. I’d talk about the reduction in load time too except it’s really hard to measure because as you can see from the waterfall diagrams, with no Pi-hole it just keeps going and going and, well, it all gets a bit silly.

Let’s level it up because I reckon the smuttier the publication, the bigger the Pi-hole gain. Let’s try these guys:

dailymail.co.uk with no pi hole

And for comparison, when loaded with the Pi-hole in place:

dailymail.co.uk-with-pi-hole

And now – (drum roll) – the network requests for each:

dailymail.co.uk network with no-pi-hole

dailymail.co.uk network with pi-hole

Holy shit! What – why?! I snapped the one without Pi-hole at 17.4 mins after I got sick of waiting. 2,663 requests (one of which was to Report URI, thank you very much!) and 57.6MB. To read the freakin’ news. (Incidentally, in this image more than the others you can clearly see requests to domains such as fff.dailymail.co.uk failing as the Pi-hole prevents them from resolving.)

After just a few quick tests, I was pretty blown away by the speed difference. I only fired this up at about 8am this morning and I’m just 9 hours into it but already seeing some pretty cool stats:

Pi-hole-dashboard

It’s also flagging a bunch of things I’d like to look at more, for example my wife’s laptop being way chattier than everything else:

Top clients

Top blocked clients

Wife's laptop requests

So in summary, no compromising devices, no putting your trust in the goodwill of an extension developer, no per-device effort, the bad stuff is blocked and the good stuff still works:

Sponsor message still works

Lastly, Pi-hole has a donate page and this is one of those cases where if you find it as awesome as I have already, you should absolutely show them some love. Cash in some of that time you’ve reclaimed by not waiting for rubbish ads to load 😎

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