Welcome to another exciting post from my old blog “A Pen Tester’s Journey.” In this post, I am going to share with you another how-to guide that I created to complement my Pi-Hole series. In this guide, I will be showing you how to add your first ad-block list to your Pi-Hole.
For those who are unfamiliar with what a Pi-Hole is you can find more information about it below to the linked blog post.
Adding Your First Ad Block List
Your Pi-hole already comes pre-programmed with a default block list that for the most part is pretty well maintained by the admins and will block a lot of your Ads already. However, this is advertised as a full customizable private DNS server, plus everyone’s internet usage is different so you will need to update your block lists as new Ads and domains appear. There are only 2 ways to do this, option 1: you can go through each DNS query in real time or after the fact and block each new ad domain that appears. This is helpful for the occasional stray Ad that gets through however, totally unrealistic for when you need to block a lot of new domains at once. Option 2 you can ad Block list from 3rd part sites or create your own that contain a huge list of Ad carrying domains. A good and trusted 3rd party site that contains such a list is https://firebog.net/ and is actually where we will be getting out very first ad Block List from.
- First thing you need to do is to find an Ad list to download, I recommend going to Fireblog, its a great website that has verified 3rd party Ad list that are safe to use.
- For this walk through we are going to use the https://v.firebog.net/hosts/AdguardDNS.txt list simply copy the list url from the website, or use the one in this walk-through.
- Now its time to log into your Pi-hole Admin Web Ui. It will be the IP address of the Pi-hole \admin (ex: 192.168.1.188/admin)
- Next we are going to navigate to the Ad lists, which should be the 7th option from the top of the left-hand navigation menu
- Below is what your Ad list page should look like by default, with only one ad list.
- To add a new list copy the URL of the walk-through or any other ad list you choose from the Fireblog website. Then past the URL in the Address bar and add any comments you want to add to help identify your list. and click add
- Make sure the adlist is enabled in the “List of adlists”
- Next go over to the left-hand navigation menu, the 7th option from the top should be “tools”, click on the ” < ” next to label to lower the drop down menu and click on “update gravity”, when the web pages loads click on the large, blue “Update” button in the middle of the page to update your PIhole with the Ad list you just added.
You have now successfully added the Ad list and your Pi-Hole will start using it to block and manage traffic on your network