Setting up PI-Hole

My setup

Currently I have small low end server witch is behind a CG-NAT, but I have a VPN so this ad blocker should work if I’m away. Also i want it as a container, so I will use pi-hole docker version. Reason why I went for container is little influenced by this project. It is really cool, it displays docker containers and logs and info about them in a terminal.

Plan

1. Read the docs and get familiar with the tool
2. Install it on the server
3. Update per device DNS settings or the router DNS settings

Docs and helpful information

pi-hole website pi-hole docs website Linus’s video about pi-hole pi-hole Github

Installation on the server

Install as container is pretty simple from this repo as they have nice compose file in a Readme. But it will not work for my setup, Because my DNS, HTTPS and HTTP ports are already in use. HTTP/HTTPS in no problem but DNS ports are different. I don’t want to stop one that’s in use already so my compose.yml file looks like this:

services:
  pihole:
    container_name: pihole
    image: pihole/pihole:latest
    ports:
      - "53:53/tcp"
      - "53:53/udp"
      - "9000:80/tcp"
      - "9443:443/tcp"
    environment:
      TZ: 'Etc/GMT'
      FTLCONF_webserver_api_password: 'ExTrAeXtRa__STRONG__PaSsWoRd'
      FTLCONF_dns_listeningMode: 'all'
    volumes:
      - './etc-pihole:/etc/pihole'
    cap_add:
      - SYS_NICE
    restart: unless-stopped

Making Pi-hole host use Pi-hole

and since I’m on ubuntu server i still need some modifications, like adding this:

static domain_name_servers=127.0.0.1

to this file /etc/dhcpcd.conf. And also stopping and disabling systemd-resolved.service service:

sudo systemctl stop systemd-resolved.service
sudo systemctl disable systemd-resolved.service

and make sure that inside /etc/resolv.conf nameserver is not something local set it to google as DNS provider:

nameserver=8.8.8.8

Making your network take advantage of Pi-hole

So here we need to configure router to use my servers pi-hole as DNS server and the app will block malicious sites, ads and unwanted sites. Each router is different but generally its under Advanced > IP Adrresing > DHCP Settings. there are many docs for understanding this further like here

Accessing web UI of Pi-Hole

The settings and whole dashboard is web based so go to your server’s IP address and application’s port and enter the password for login. If you didn’t set the password it will generate a random one and print that in logs, be sure to change it afterwards. after that you have full accesses to this powerful application.