I'll start it without the fan - keeping dust out of the innards is good and the mechanical room is not exactly dust free. I ordered the parts, we'll see how it goes! Amazon has the kit with the parts you listed for $60, that's what I ordered.
I'll start it without the fan - keeping dust out of the innards is good and the mechanical room is not exactly dust free. I ordered the parts, we'll see how it goes! Amazon has the kit with the parts you listed for $60, that's what I ordered.
Look what arrived.
For those of you interested: The Model 3B+ was released today
Faster processor with a heat spreader, improved WIFI, and ability to use Power over Ethernet. The latter being pretty interesting since there's a HD camera component which can be added.
Looks like the next project is going to be a pool and garage camera for me.
Still no complaints about the Pi-Hole. Even after a couple power outages it comes back online before the modem and router reboot.
Oooooo. POE is huge. Power supplies for these are a mess, add cost, and can be pretty unreliable (in terms of max amperage supplied). Plus, its ammunition for me to get a POE switch to run a few security cams.
For the pool & garage cam, why not just get a HD POE cam off the shelf? Or do you want the extra pixels?
In reply to ProDarwin :
PoE is a huge boon for me too because I hate power adapters. Bulky clumsy things with a cable that's either way too long or way to short.
For the cameras:
There's a couple of reasons:
With 2 Pi's I'd be in it for maybe 150 bucks with cases and cables. I have an older PC I can use it as the NVR. The control software out there currently would allow me to tunnel into my home network for remote viewing without injecting someone else's service in between us. I've got this thing about security camera footage being stored on a cloud server. AWS and Nest are sufficiently hardened but I really don't trust anyone else.
Last reason is that if I stick one outside I can also put the weather station add on into it for fun.
Oh hey, this thread. I'm on the pi hole bandwagon too! My experience has been consistent with what others here have reported.
I'm excited to check out the new one, POE support would be a major plus for me.
At work I use a number of POE 1080p Amcrest cameras. I use their firmware to setup them up and just tell them to write to the local network drive. No NVR needed. If you have a shared drive at home it is likely more than adequate. These are far less complex than the Pis and very much plug 'n play by comparison.
The Pi camera will do a lot higher than 1080p stills though.
Minor update.
CloudFlare (steered by the crusher of Nazi forums CEO Matthew Prince) opened access to it's privacy focused DNS servers today.
There's a slight improvement in speed compared to Level3 and it was easy to implement from the basement on my phone.
Update time.
I’m not the smartest guy in the room, just like I was never the best mechanic. What I excel at is designing queries to find potentially relevant information then filtering the new information through facts that I’ve already gathered or past experiences. It’s a skill developed by having spent far too much time spent breaking things thinking I knew what I was doing then later honed by scolding junior mechanics for de-preserving and shot-gunning $10k+ parts at airplanes. On Saturday that skill came in handy.
A few weeks ago, I attempted to update to Pi-Hole v3.3 since the FTLdns had been revamped and I'm big on keeping things up to date. Unfortunately, I only read most of the release notes prior to updating.
There’s a technical issue with Raspbian Jessie’s dnsmasq which doesn’t support a flag that the Pi-Hole uses for its data logging. If you just upgrade while running Jessie, it doesn’t update the dnsmaq and, when you install Pi-Hole’s v3.3 modules, it breaks DNS lookup queries.
I un-berkeleyed the Pi-Hole by changing the DNS server on the router back to my ISPs (remember the router points the DNSlookup request to the Pi-Hole), downgraded the Pi-Hole to 3.2.1, pointed the router DNS server back at the Pi-Hole, and left things be as it took me a lot longer than it should have.
Over the weekend I decided I was going to get things working because I’m a stubborn mule.
The first thing you do is upgrade dnsmasq.
Directions on how to do so are here (I don’t know how GRM feels about me posting code so I’ll just link to the blog.)
The next thing you do is run
pihole -up
Things went a little sideways again during this step. After my last endeavor, which broke the hell out of the Pi-Hole, apparently the tags denoting the current version got a bit messed up.
After a bit of searching to ensure I’m not the only one with the issue, which is generally a truism in life, I ran across a thread which detailed the exact problem I was having.
Fortunately, the developers of Pi-Hole had posted a set of commands to rebuild the tags and get the update command working again.
Annoyingly rebuilding the tags and running the update command didn’t update AdminLTE (the web interface) which meant I had to manually update it. Again, link to the solution which was in the same thread luckily.
That got everything on the current release so you’d think I’d had enough by now. Well you’d be wrong. I decided that I wanted to remote into the Raspberry Pi using RDP services because I run the Pi-Hole headless and was tired of dragging out a monitor, keyboard, and mouse when I wanted to update things.
The caveat was that I wanted to use Windows RDP viewer, rather than install yet another application, and a quick search turned up that xRDP is the quick solution to my woes.
I installed and configured xRDP then, predictably, got a very generic error message of
Error – problem connecting.
Ugh. That was easily solved with a quick stop by StackExchange then installing tightVNC on the RPi.
In theory I’ve got everything working so I can just use the update command in the future. I guess we’ll see.
The new FTLdns build is really good. There was a small but noticeable delay on several sites before the page fully loaded, mainly Wordpress type sites which support continuous scrolling and sites which make heavy use of user tracking. This fixed quite a bit of the delay.
I also took a moment to install Plex on the Pi so I could stop turning on my wife’s laptop every time my kids want to watch a movie (or Curious George.) I have a 4TB WD Red drive sitting on my counter but I haven’t decided if I want to build an NAS or just call it good with a powered enclosure. I can’t report on how well Plex Server on RPi works yet due to that.
The next project is going to be getting DNS over TLS up and running to prevent any type of DNS snooping by my ISP since AT&T appears to be reviving this as a user monetization strategy and others won't be far behind.
In reply to The0retical :
Any updates on your Pi? I'm reviving this thread because I am curious about buying a Pi to tinker with and to run Pi-hole.
I see that the Pi is now on version 4. It feels kinda overkill to buy a Pi model 4 just to run Pi-hole on. Maybe a 3b+ would be better? Just buy a ready to run kit? Maybe buy a model 2 to run Pi-hole on and then a model 4 to tinker with?
Suggestions welcome 
In reply to stanger_missle :
Everything has been working virtually flawlessly. This is easily the best piece of open source software I've worked with in the 25 years I've been tinkering in that area.
There's been a couple of minor things that have gone wrong besides what I detailed in the last post:
My side project, the Plex server, had the variant I was using deprecated, which is fine, the 3B didn't have enough juice to transcode most videos anyway. I have a dedicated media server for that now.
If you're just going to run Pi-Hole and do some basic tinkering I'd just get the $35 RPi 4 with 1gb of RAM. Same amount of RAM but a substantially more powerful chipset. It's more than powerful enough to run most applications including Pi-Hole. There really doesn’t seem to be any deals to be had on new or used 3B+’s either.
The foundation did fix the issue with the ethernet sharing the same bus as the USB ports. As a result, ethernet and USB performance have greatly increased which gives you the option to use it as a NAS. It won’t affect the Pi-Hole that much however as the data throughput requirements are pretty low.
There are two downsides to the new board as I see it.
The first is that the USB-C port is not USB-C standard compliant so you need to be careful which charger you use. They’re hardly alone on this though (Nintendo…..)
The other is that the new chipset is substantially more powerful. As a result it generates more heat. A concerning amount of more heat according to some articles I’ve read if you really push it with RetroPi and the like. The official case doesn’t have a fan, so I suspect it probably isn’t a big deal under most circumstances, but if one is required I'd want to be careful about which fan I choose as I don't have a dedicated network cabinet or closet so I may have to listen to it all the time.
Random side note looking back at some things I mentioned earlier in the thread: I fixed the mobile Youtube ad issue with Youtube vanced. It took a minute to setup on the Android devices but I didn't have to root them. It was merely a matter of installing Micro-G, installing Youtube 'Vanced, then disabling the standard Youtube app. Poof no more Youtube ads on mobile.
I'm gonna find out how to add this thread to some kind of watchlist. I've been kicking the idea around for years to build a Pie-hole for my networks at home and that ad-based cryptominer really is nailing it for me, though I run uBlock origin and NoScript on most my machines.
How easy is this for someone with no Debian/Linux/Pi experience to use? I've found old links off lifehacker/Astechnica on making one but more hands is better in my opinion. And what versions of the Pi can run this?
Whats the best forum to look at to learn Pi stuff without getting called stupid ?
Also Arduino stuff so I can get my CNC router working ?
Thanks
In reply to GIRTHQUAKE :
The pi-hole setup and configuration is really simple if you have at a minimal understanding of how your home router works. The documentation on the projects site is easy to understand and apply. The developers are also very responsive on both their discord channel and on Reddit.
My understanding is that you can run Pi-hole on a pi-zero on up to the latest variant the Pi4. The newest version of Rasperian, Buster, appears to have some random issues with Pi-Hole the dev team is sorting out now. Stretch and Jessie both still seem to work well enough.
Its been 10 plus years since I messed with Debian in any meaningful way (Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn was the hot distro at that point). The way it operates is much different these days. I had very little issue figuring it out.
In reply to californiamilleghia :
Honestly, Reddit and StackExchange. The official Raspberry Pi forum is pretty good too.
MyPiLifeUp is ok for some instructional items if you're just starting out. I used them for the Plex installation and configuration.
I really like Hackaday but that tends to be more advanced applications of Pi and Audrino projects.
ArsTechnica's forums are also a great resource as is XDA-Developers.
Great thread, and thank you for posting. I need to try this.
Alright, time for an update because I completely botched it this time.
Ever since the DNSmasq issue I had with v3.3 of Pi-hole I've been having issues keeping the software on the release branch of FTL. I have no idea why that was and I would have to run -checkoutmaster before running each update or FTL wouldn't update.
For some reason this annoyed me enough a couple days ago to figure out something to do about it.... You can probably see where this is going.
datenreise.de has been an awesome resource in configuring the Pi, and various other projects, as I don't have the kind of mental bandwidth to remember all the necessary commands to do things in Linux as I only futz with it occasionally. Using their guide I updated the system to Raspbian Buster.
Going to be honest here: berkeley that.
This device really only serves one purpose - to run the Pi-Hole software headless. I mess about with other things as the mood strikes me there's nothing on it that I'm not willing to lose. The update took about 2 hours. I could have flashed a new image onto the SD card and reconfigured the Pi-Hole in 1/4 of that time.
Unfortunately things got a little weird after the update which, of course, I did over remote desktop. For whatever reason the new version of Raspbian decided that it didn't want to play nice with my current network configuration and permanently killed my remote connection.
Naturally I went upstairs, grabbed the Pi and dropped it next to my other machine in the basement to reconfigure over the wifi. This is were things got annoying.
The Pi did boot up and I was able to physically interface with the device.
I determined that the DNSing was borked and somehow the DNS server got itself set to 127.0.0.1, which is effectively what broke the network configuration, on the Pi by running
sudo nano /etc/dhcpcd.conf
There was an entry for eth0, the network jack, having the static IP specified and the DNS servers specified.
Supposedly you can edit the config file to specify a different DNS server (1.1.1.1 being the easiest) but doing so and restarting the service didn't seem to fix the issue.
Annoyed I pulled the SD card, formatted it, and flashed the Buster image to the card to start fresh. That took all of 20 minutes.
Setting up the Pi again is much easier in Buster (mostly because you can just check a box now and get the US keyboard configuration) so I ran through that.
This time I removed real-vnc and installed XRDP right off the bat to make my life easier, then installed the Pi-Hole software again.
Well, as it turns out, if you're only hooked to wifi with Stretch or Buster, and you try to configure the LAN port for a static IP configuration while it isn't hooked up, it breaks the E36 M3 out of DNSing for wireless too. Because I ran into exactly the same problem as before.
Realizing this I then cleared out the LAN configuration by right clicking on the wifi icon on the tool bar, selected WLAN0, pressed clear, and rebooted. That fixed the DNS problem.
I then ran
pihole -r
which let me reconfigure the Pi-Hole to use the wireless network settings. I then shut everything down and hooked the Pi back into my network via the network cable, remoted into it, ran pihole -r again, configured it to the LAN ports network configuration, and finally then set the IP address as a reserved address on my router. I then remoted to the LANs IP address and disabled wifi.
Everything works like it did 3 days ago now. Not really sure I won anything by embarking on this adventure but I feel better that the OS is up to date.
Moral of the story. If you are going to run the Pi headless just setup XRDP, hook the device back into the network via the LAN port, then setup the Pi-Hole software over RDS. It avoids a bunch of these problems.
Anyway things work now and I was able to put in a stripped out image of Buster on the Pi to mess about with. Nothing like creating a 3 night long hobby-ist IT problem.
I've seen headlines for Pi-Hole while scrolling by... This is neat, though the security person in me shudders at piping curl into bash. Still, I own enough Internet of E36 M3 stuff, I should really do this with one of the older Pis I have gathering dust. Nice write-up.
I set mine up maybe a month ago. It was easy to get up and running without ever hooking a mouse, keyboard or monitor into the Pi using SSH. Mines been chugging away doing its thing without a hitch since. I occasionally use the web interface to check on the percentage of queries it blocks. My only regret is not doing this sooner..
No noticeable change in internet speed one way or the other.
In reply to Mike :
Yea piping curl into bash isn't exactly the best idea. I only had limited experience with the Linux environment before running down this path (as you can see I'm still not an expert on it) so I didn't understand why it could be bad.
I assume the project offers it because it's easy for beginners to get the device up and running.
There is a method to either clone the repository and install it locally, or download it and run it locally, which would be quite a bit safer. Provided you know what you're looking for.
I'm getting a bit better with the Debian environment the more I play with it, but I've come to the conclusion that I'm the kind of user who knows just enough to be dangerous. That's why I work in implementation and marketing rather than development.
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