[colug-432] self-signed cert on the main website.

[Rick Hornsby]

On February 8, 2020 at 23:07:44, Damien Calloway (
damiencalloway at fastmail.com) wrote:

> Actually, nvm - I did a quick search and apparently ERL = EdgeRouter Lite.
> Have not seen it abbreviated that way before. I have an EdgeROuterX, which
> also has a firewall baked in
>
> Calling it a night, but am pressing a spare Pi 3 into service. I am
> embarrassed to say how that happened, but I am going to roll Pi Hole + SNMP
> trap + OpenVPN on this thing. I may pelt the list with questions when that
> happens.
>

PiHole is kind of amazing. It’s a simple concept, but it works so well and
so transparently. It’s rarely detected by the anti-adblocker “disable to
view this site” because it doesn’t run in the browser, but rather at the
network level.

It rarely interferes with normal operations. Only in a very few cases I’ve
had to temporarily (ie 5 min timer) disable it, and most of those times the
site was broken anyway. I may have whitelisted a couple of sites.

If you’re not familiar, most ad blockers run in the browser and manipulate
the HTML using various techniques to hide ads and other nonsense. PiHole
works by acting as your network’s DNS server. PiHole maintains a list of
domains like doubleclick.com and when a lookup request comes in from your
computer, PiHole will return basically a blackhole response - 127.0.0.1 I
think. The browser tries to get the doubleclick ad from
http://127.0.0.1/ad/malware/garbage - and gets a connection refused or 404
if you happen to be running an HTTP server.

Either way, it works. Even though I never set up Netflix on the “smart” TV
it oddly kept talking to NF. Quite a bit. So I added the netflix.com domain
to PiHole.

PiHole also showed me how much noise Adobe CC was generating - talking to
more than a dozen unique endpoints, with far more DNS requests from one
host than anything else on the LAN.

It’s definitely worth it.
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