>I think the video discusses using a Pi Zero v1.3, which is older kit but still available for $5. The newer Pi Zero W which includes WiFi and Bluetooth is $10. Of course, you need to add a power supply, case, MicroSD card and Ethernet cable so it ends up being a bit more than $5 ;) but most vendors have cost-effective kits to get you going.

Read up yesterday night on different Raspi versions - as I prefer cable based LAN where possible, it was reccommended to buy a Pi3 after quickscannng a few reports, although even Pi B is reported to shoulder the load (with disabled logging at least...)

While not totally adverse to buying more HW, this would add to the cable chaos around the routers on physical desktop. As I have flooded myself with VMs last week I decided to test waters with software alone. There is a .iso for RasPi, so I spun up Virtualbox and after only 1 hasty install I had thought enough about the issues to get tweaked second approach working. Have now a RasPi VM intercepting the all DNS lookup in my personal/work subnet - with Raspi in HW I could point 2 other routers to the cleaning DNS server. At least for most of my personal electronic zoo I can test it - and the excepted media subnet is not really plagued by advertising.

Basic ingredient was switching network from NAT to Bridged in VirtualBox setup, which leads to VM getting IP not from host, but asking router. There you have the same step as with physical RasPi to ascertain fixed IP based on MAC adress, as DHCP might lead to errors on fixed DNS server setting. On second try I succeded in doing everything without mistake. Creating VM, setting up RasPi inside, installing PiHole and re-pointing Router took a bit more than 30 minutes, but not even 5 minutes of concentrated keyboard input. Best done when you are busy doing other things, but really nothing hard - Linux install scripts are great nowadays.

Does work - but filters less than expected from video linked in OP, perhaps there are not typical enough german advertising sites blacklisted. Youtube still sneaks some advertizing, not many english speaking sites tested - I am hoping for more traditional "newspaper" sites to load without all that advertizing slowing down my poor old Snapdragons...

Currently 25% of DNS queries filtered into oblivion. Will try out next month with it - and then decide if I plunk down ~60-80€ and go with HW RasPi 3 or 4, get a bit more RAM for about same amount or abandon Pi Hole again. Had hoped for better HTML load times with my aging Nexi 7 (only tablets offering Qi loading...), but DNS lookup cache or discard did not really make big difference when checking without direct comparison. I will compare same sites Pi-Holed in one machine, loaded normally via different WLan in the other later to get true comparison not based on memory.

If someone wants to follow up with VirtualBox approach but needs better description, ask and I'll type something less cryptic up ;-)

thx again for the original link

thomas

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>Most of the manual network settings in the video were because they were testing it on a portion of an already established production network, which they didn't want to disrupt. At one point they did touch on setting routers to dole out the PiHole as the DNS server for any DHCP client. As you point out, that makes it transparent and mostly ubiquitous.
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>>Interesting usage... I am for the first time actually tempted to buy 1 or 2 to Pi (plural would have been too sweet...) to play when nights are longer again. I did not look / listen to the chip description closely (other than being 5$, which would point to Pi1 ?