<html><head></head><body><br><div class="gmail_signature">On February 8, 2020 at 23:07:44, Damien Calloway (<a href="mailto:damiencalloway@fastmail.com">damiencalloway@fastmail.com</a>) wrote:</div> <blockquote type="cite" class="gmail_quote"><span><div><div></div><div>
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<p>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</p>
<p>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.</p></div></div></span></blockquote><p><br></p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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 <a href="http://doubleclick.com">doubleclick.com</a> 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 <a href="http://127.0.0.1/ad/malware/garbage">http://127.0.0.1/ad/malware/garbage</a> - and gets a connection refused or 404 if you happen to be running an HTTP server.</p><p>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 <a href="http://netflix.com">netflix.com</a> domain to PiHole.</p><p>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.</p><p>It’s definitely worth it.</p><p><br></p><blockquote type="cite" class="gmail_quote"><span>
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