Shut that pi-hole, dude
- Details
- Category: Slices of Pi
It took a while, but after having lost my previous Raspberry Pi to the Gods Of SD Card Failures, I finally got around to setting pi-hole up again on the new one (backups, dude, backups! Yes, I hear ya...)
First things first: what's a Pie Hole? It's a bit of software actually called pi-hole meant to keep network clients (and users, family members, pets, stray aliens, etc) from getting overwhelmed with the ads and trackers the Daemons of Internet try to bestow upon us on a continuous basis.
To do so it acts as DNS server in your network and compares each DNS-request to a list of known ad/spam/malicious sites. If the DNS address requested is on there it disappears into pi-hole's Black Hole of Doom. Furthermore, it includes a DHCP, so you can use pi-hole as your one-stop shop for your basic networking needs.
It's easy to install. The project's home is at https://pi-hole.net and their GitHub at https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/#one-step-automated-install tells you how to proceed.
Then why, dear writer, are you writing this blog post? Glad you asked, esteemed reader... Pi-Hole sets up its own webserver. Just like most other projects which sport a webinterface for easy administration. That's great - but it's yet another service running on my pi. I'd rather re-use what I have. Since my energy-use tracking system (DSMR, blog post to come!) uses Nginx that's what I want pi-hole to use, too. And it does - now.
Interested in getting Pi-Hole running with Nginx ? Read on.