Users of Pi Hole
Users of Pi Hole
It's interesting to see how many individuals are adopting Pi Hole and enjoying its features. Have you found any innovative applications beyond the usual ones? Are you leveraging it for your regional network or also employing it to manage VPN traffic? Additionally, do you host it on a Raspberry Pi or a virtual machine?
I'll provide an update this weekend, planning it for Saturday. Raspberry Pi.
I’ve got Pi Hole set up and really enjoy it. It’s been adjusted so it also removes unwanted add-ons from my VPN connections. I’ve also arranged for my clients to receive DNS details directly from my router, rather than just the router handling that part. This gives me visibility into which devices are making requests—useful for keeping an eye on things, especially with kids online. I haven’t tried it yet, but you could achieve similar results by using Pi Hole as both your DNS and DHCP server.
Some interesting details: I’m on Verizon’s cheaper unlimited plan. It limits my streaming speed to 480p instead of higher resolutions, and I suspect 720p is the same cutoff. I’m not sure if it works the same with Pi Hole alone.
My phones are all set to connect via home VPN, which helps protect against Pi Hole interference. Since traffic is encrypted, I’m not getting throttled by Verizon’s streaming limits. This lets me stream in 4K without interruption.
To make this work, you’ll need a strong upload connection at home—my speed is around 70-75Mbps on Comcast. That caps my download/upload speeds at roughly that level. If I’m downloading over the VPN, the upload determines the speed; if I’m uploading to the web through the VPN, traffic flows from there. My maximum is about 75Mbps.
If you’re planning this, a powerful home connection is essential. The reason it’s manageable is that my upload is the bottleneck. I currently have around 250MB of RAM on a Windows 2016 VM with Debian, using 500MB for startup and dynamic memory. Pi Hole only uses about 2% CPU, which is minimal. It consumes roughly 20-30% of the 500MB allocated, so it’s unlikely to cause issues.
Looking at stats, around 20% of queries are blocked—considering data caps, that’s a solid amount of saved bandwidth (not 20% overall, but still likely 5-7% if you browse a lot).
If you enable VPN on your phones and have data limits, keep in mind encryption adds about 10% to usage. You might offset this by using Pi Hole to block ads and pop-ups.
RaspberryPi offers great value for its price, supporting many simple and enjoyable projects. Their main advantage lies in their suitability for kids and young learners. It’s surprising how few schools are adopting them for teaching programming or other subjects like Python. I’m eager to see the next version’s performance—especially USB 3.0 support and gigabit speeds.
I run it on a virtual machine and it really assists with organizing websites. It occasionally interferes with things like ESPN streaming, but it also has a 5-minute pause option if needed. The caching feature provides a solid speed improvement when handling many requests.
hadn't learned about this before, good to know! I own a couple of raspis and plan to set one up on my storage server—it’s always running.
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