For home users, protection against advertising is essential. First you have to block all the shop channels on TV, then all the advertisements on the Internet: and immediately the pages starts to load faster and the information is perceived better!
In old times, I configured Squid and SAMS , but this protection worked at the router level and could not block everything. And Pi-hole works at the DNS level and all pass-through it!
Hardware selection
You can install it on a virtual machine, but for the true fillings, it is better to do it in a minicomputer. I take the budget option, Orange Pi Pc Plus this one:
Be sure to buy it with the power supply, it is almost impossible to find one with the correct connector!
Advantages of Orange Pi Pc Plus over Raspberry
– Price
– He has a eMMC, and it is much faster and more durable than SD cards
Advantages of Orange Pi Pc Plus over other Orange Pi
– It’s on an old and well studied chip, and this is a great advantage! Now new models are being launched, for example, with an M2 connector, and it seems that it only pleases the view, because the manufacturer does not tell how to make it work!
Quick setup Orange Pi Pc Plus
Download from here the last image www.armbian.com/orange-pi-pc-plus/ , follow the installation instructions on that same page (you have to make permanent IP). Anyway, we need an SD card, you have to boot from it and execute a command to transfer the operating system to eMMC
sudo nand-sata-install
A couple of local OPPC + articles with photos: Orange Pi PC Plus Overview! , DIY fan controller in Orange Pi PC Plus !
No need to put the fan, it does not overheat without it! Of course, a radiator is necessary, it is always useful!
Install Pi-hole
We go as root in our minipc through ssh or with Windows through Putty (or Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)) or immediately from the console if it is MAC or Linux, for Ubuntu the command is like this
sudo ssh root@192.168.1.209
The installation is very simple.
curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash
We accept all the installer’s props! We need a static IP, it is clear that we need it, it is already static! Pi-hole also puts its own web server, I didn’t have a preinstalled web server (the one with Node-Red is unusual), so I accept everything!
CAUTION: On the last page of the installation process at the bottom, you will se an administrator password!
Well, it’s not difficult to install Pi-hole. I go to the administration page and everything works!
http://тут_IP_вашего_сервера/admin/
Now on my home router in the dhcp service, I change DNS servers, which will now be the IP server with Pi-hole.
This page may be different on your router, but surely you have a router at home, a web interface and a DHCP service runnig on it! It is better to restart the devices connected to the network (phones, tablets, laptops) to obtain a new DNS!
I enter as administrator, they gave me the password at the end of the installation, the DNS has already worked, the blocking statistics are renewed!
The most famous and largest advertising services are already blocked. But on your favorite site there may be small or little known advertising chains. I love the site www.rbc.ru, but its advertising is disgusting, especially when you browse the site on a tablet only ~ 20% of the site remains, the rest is advertising !!!
Advertising on www.rbc.ru its not blocked in Pi-hole, so you have to find its urls. I pointed to the ads, right mouse button – show the URL and took the address (name.ru) from there and added it to the Pi-hole in the Blacklist with the Add (wildcard) , there were a few see photo
Now lets look at the tablet
Befor…
… you can’t see the first news !!!!!
After!!!
When you open any web page in Query log , you can see which URL is called, which one were blocked and which one not, you can block it immediately here! Of course, all urls are shown there, if there are many users in your network, it will be a bit difficult to find information about urls that your website is calling!
Hello,
thanks a lot
I have an Orange Pi PC 2.
I would like to install squid on it for safety purposes.
Alternatively,I will install pi-hole.
I would not find a recipe to install squid on any Orange Pi Computers.
Would you recommend to work on the installation of squid on the Orange Pi PCs or rather not please?
Thank you!
Kindest regards
Beckmann
MSc / PhD Absolvent munich, DE
I used to use SQUID with SAMS2 (web interface) on FreeBSD yeares ago for traffic count and web blocking… but it never worked for me with https traffic. For web blocking Pi-hole is very good
For safety there is Snort ш installed it on FreeeBSD in 2014 my experience https://itcooky.com/?p=3108 (in russian)
That could be an interesting challenge to installed it on Orange Pi Ж)