Project Pi-Hole

Yesterday while I was working on a tiny IoT Project (SMS Bot) with a raspberry pi, I’ve discovered in one of my drawers a similar mini pc that I’ve bought some years ago.

It’s an Orange-pi which is more or less the chinese version of a raspberry pi 🙂

While I was thinking what I should do with that nice piece of hardware, I stumbled accross the pi-hole project.

Below you can see the specifications:

As a base Image I’ve decided to flash armbian stretch on it. The only thing you need is a SDCard (Max. 32GB with the pc-plus model), a SDCard Reader and a tool to write the image file on it.

After the flashing process is finished, we can insert the SDCard and boot the orange-pi. SSH is enabled by default and we should optain an IP Adress by DHCP.

Default credentials are: root / 1234

After login with root we have the change the root password and create a new user with sudo priviledges.

The next step is to set a static ip address and install pi-hole.

Pi-hole is an advertising and Internet tracker blocking application at the Linux network level that acts as a DNS sinkhole for use on a private network.

Armbian comes with a little config application that allows us both to setup a static ip address instead of DHCP and allows us to install some 3rd party applications like pi-hole.

sudo armbian-config

Just follow the steps in the 3rd party installer to finish the setup. It’s really easy.

Alternatively you can also install pi-hole by command line:

apt-get update

apt-get upgrade

curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

After the setup is finished it generates a admin password where you can access the admin panel.

In my case It’s http://172.17.17.15/admin/

Another cool thing is that the Pi-hole project supports the Quad9 DNS Servers 🙂

Quad9 routes your DNS queries through a secure network of servers around the globe. The system uses threat intelligence from more than a dozen of the industry’s leading cyber security companies to give a real-time perspective on what websites are safe and what sites are known to include malware or other threats. If the system detects that the site you want to reach is known to be infected, you’ll automatically be blocked from entry – keeping your data and computer safe. 

After that you can change the DNS Settings on your router / firewall to point on the pi-hole