Marilyn Perry's Notes On the Pi-Hole Network Wide Ad-Blocking Software Application

In the worldwide war against World Wide Web advertisers, from Google and doubleclick.net, to the thousands of other internet advertising syndication agencies, the open-source local area network (LAN) wide ad-blocking computer software application called Pi-Hole is the state-of-the-art defense system for combating the ever-growing onslaught that is internet advertising.

Internet advertising is more than an annoyance. Internet advertising is a security risk. Internet advertising, and the agencies that purvey it, are also a constant threat to the right to personal privacy. Worse yet, internet advertising has even been used as a delivery agent to deploy malicious and destructive computer software viruses, including ransomware.

The current answer to the broad spectrum computerized threat that is internet advertising is the open-source software program called pi-hole. The pi-hole software program blocks advertising at the local area network (LAN) level. The open-source, community developed and maintained, pi-hole software application blocks internet advertising by firewalling a local area network at its domain name service (DNS) level. As of writing these notes about pi-hole, the application currently blocks over 150,000 internet advertising domains at a local area network's DNS point of access! The Pi-Hole software implements is an amazing wide area network defense strategy!

With pi-hole, for the most part, it's no longer necessary to install tools such as web browser Ad-Block add-ons because the pi-hole system has already blocked the domains that the Ad-Block add-on would otherwise block, by blocking them at a LAN's DNS entry point.

Upon first finding out about pi-hole while watching an episode of the computer tech channel Level1Techs on Youtube, Pi-Hole seemed like an excellent solution to the internet advertisers' worldwide war against internet users. During that first introduction from Wendell of Level1techs though, it seemed like deployment of pi-hole might be difficult. Later on, however, my brain's “I've got an idea” factory fired itself up with ideas to explore a different pi-hole deployment approach than the various options that Wendell of Level1techs had described in his various Youtube videos that contain information about the helpful beyond measure, open-source, community developed and maintained, Pi-Hole software application. Most of the options that Wendell has discussed involved using computer hardware such as Raspberry Pi computers or installing the software in the operating system in network attached storage (NAS) systems. Not being a fan of under powered Raspberry Pi computers and not having and using a separate NAS system, meant that it would useful to consider other computer hardware and operating system solutions that could deploy a PI-Hole on my local area network.