Because of the pandemic, my sons have been using laptops a lot for gaming during the day. Their machines don''t have adblockers. I figured this was a good time to set up pi-hole.
I used Raspian imager to image an SD card. I then plugged in the SD card, hooked up the raspberry pi to my monitor/mouse/keyboard at my desk and ran through the Raspbian setup wizard.
Then I powered down the Pi and moved it to the entertainment center and hooked it up to the router and (temporarily) TV and a mouse/keyboard.
Pi-Hole provides a ''one-command'' installer script:
curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash
There were a few prompts in the install script, I accepted all the defaults. One thing I wonder about is using an ''upstream'' DNS server apart from Google. I left it at Google, I''ll look into the other DNS servers another time.
That was up and running and I thought I was ''done'' so I tested loading people.com on my phone (while connected to Wi-Fi) and ads still showed up. I realized I forgot to configure the router to use the new DNS server.
So I looked up instructions for how to do that on my router and did so, it was pretty easy.
Pi-Hole provides a web interface, which worked without issues, but I wanted to be able to ssh into the pi-hole in the future so I don''t need to connect it to the TV. I found out that Raspbian lets you do this with a few points-and-clicks. Then I could ssh from any laptop in the house on the wifi. I took the HDMI cable, mouse and keyboard out of the pi and the project was done.
Setting up Pi-Hole was really easy. The whole bit was one in about an hour and the kids were back to gaming in no time.