Shout-outs to the team that developed Pi-Hole. I just installed and began using it, and I'm overwhelmed by how awesome it is.
I first heard about it on Hacker News.[1] I have a Pi 2 hanging around the house. I'd used it for awhile as a Kodi box before I got annoyed with how poorly it worked over the combination of my wifi network and one of NFS/Samba, so it has been sitting around in a drawer gathering dust. I reflashed the device with Raspbian and began playing around with a leafnode installation, which works and is fun. But this pi-hole thing seemed like a great experiment.
Holy crap. I installed it at 5PM tonight and the whole family is already asking me why the network is suddenly faster. The dashboard shows it's already blocked many hundreds of calls to advert and tracker sites - a full tenth of the DNS requests it's received.
Installing it was a piece of cake - really lovely work.
I'm still figuring it out. Seems like it has cleverly packaged up an installation of DNSMasq [2], who does all the heavy lifting in managing a local DNS server and an auto-updating hosts file containing over a hundred thousand shit sites.
Both sites have donate buttons on them - I'm going to throw some cash their way later this week. This device was a cool little thing even before, but it's just found an extraordinary new reason to be plugged into my network.
On the hacker thread [1] there's a huge discussion about how adverts are a necessary part of keeping sites funded. I disagree. I buy products from the manufacturers I want. When I want. If I want. And advertisers have royally f*cked up some sites. Some popular news sites are damned near unreadable these days. Suddenly: all the adverts are gone. Good riddance.
[1]