AdBlocking with Pi-Hole and Ubuntu 14.04 on VirtualBox

So far I've been quite happy using uBlock Origin on Chrome and don't really use any other browser, however what I did find annoying were the ads on my phone and that when someone comes over and brings their laptop they get ads and since I've on a bandwidth cap with Teksavvy every 'bit' counts!

I've seen this post before on reddit about adblocking using a raspberry-pi and dnsmasq, however I do not have a raspberry pi, what I do have is virtualbox running on an old iMac that I use as a KODI media center.

Upon reading what Pi-Hole actually does it seems that it would have no issue running on Ubuntu. Installation was simple enough, I would recommend heading over to https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole to get an updated instruction but all one has to do is open up a terminal and type:

curl -L install.pi-hole.net | bash

You will be prompted to type in your root password at some point. It is highly recommended that you set a static IP for your device or set the router to assign the same IP based on the mac address (this is what I have done).

Since I was also running Apache, I just had to change the port for Lighttpd (/etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf) to 8080 to allow access to the /admin for Pi-Hole.



After I had everything up and running all that was left was to change the DNS setting on my router (ASUS RT-N56U), head over to the WAN section and set your dns to the IP of your Pi-Hole device, I left one of Googles DNS just in case my virtual machine crashes. Now all devices on my network have adblocking and I'm saving a lot more bandwidth thanks to Pi-Hole!


It even works on in-app ads, however certain apps still had ads like Yahoo Weather.





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