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Showing posts from April, 2017

pi-hole - awful name, great product!

Advertised as "A Black Hole for Internet Advertisements" pi-hole ( https://pi-hole.net/ ) goes a long way to living up to this reputation. What is it? pi-hole is a domain name server that can be installed with one command onto a Linux box or Raspberry Pi running Raspbian or similar. Once this is done, an update to your site's DNS records and all queries get pushed through the pi-hole, blocked as appropriate and then sent out to the world. We are running it on an Ubuntu 14.04LTS virtual server, with 1GB of RAM and a single vCPU - and the DNS response time is quite acceptable. A tiny server will run this software quite easily. Why use it? If I'm looking at websites and browsing around, typically I'm not just getting my content that I want - there's a bit more sneaking through. Ads! Most sites will use advertisements to make money and I have no problem with this. My issue usually stems from having too many of the damn things popping up and chewing up re