If you don’t already know about pi-hole, you should check it out at
https://pi-hole.net!
It provides DNS-level ad-blocking for all of the devices on your network. You
simply install the software on your home network and configure your router to
use the pi-hole as your DNS server.
The installation process looked like the following for me,
- Install pi-hole on my raspberry-pi
curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash -
Gave my raspberry-pi a static IP
-
Configured router to use the raspberry-pi with pi-hole as my DNS server.
-
Success! Here’s a simple example of Tom’s Hardware without ads.
There are a couple of caveats however. First, pi-hole will prevent Google’s
sponsored links from working. These are typically the first couple of
links that are returned after a search. I’m sure you’d be able to configure
pi-hole to allow these links if you’d like. Second, if your raspberry-pi goes
down so will the internet for your household. This happened only a couple
of times for me and a quick raspberry-pi reboot fixed the problem.