How to remove ads from every screen in your house at once
What you will learn
- How one small computer removes adverts for every device in the house at once
- The two decisions nobody explains, and why one of them can freeze your internet
- The mistake that left a machine deaf for days, and how to get back in
Advert blockers live inside your web browser. That means they protect exactly one program on exactly one device. They do nothing for your television, nothing for the apps on your phone, and nothing for your mother's laptop when she is sitting on your sofa.
There is a much better place to do it.
Every device on your network has to ask a question before it can load anything: what is the address for this name? Something on your network answers that question, rather like a telephone directory.
If you own the thing that answers, you decide which names get an answer. An advert server asks, gets nothing back, and the page loads without it.
One small box. The whole house. Every device. Nobody has to install anything.
That is all the software called Pi-hole is. It is a telephone directory that refuses to look up certain numbers.
What it runs on
Mine started on a very small computer that had been sitting in a drawer doing nothing for months. That is exactly the right sort of hardware for this. It uses almost no electricity, it makes no noise, and the job itself is genuinely tiny.
An old laptop works. A spare desktop works.
The two decisions nobody explains
First: where does it send the questions it does not block? It is not a complete directory, it is a filter sitting in front of one. For the requests it allows through, it has to ask somebody for the real answer. Pick a public one and stop thinking about it.
Do not point it at your router. Later on you are going to point your router at this box. If you have also pointed the box at the router, the two of them will sit there asking each other the same question forever, and nothing will ever load.
Second: what happens if it stops working? Once your whole house asks this one box for everything, it becomes a single point of failure. Nothing browses until it is back.
The obvious fix is to add a second directory as a backup. Do not. Devices do not politely fall back to the second one. They ask whichever answers fastest, so a random slice of your traffic skips the filter entirely and adverts leak through. You would be trading real blocking for resilience you probably do not need.
I run mine with no backup at all. If it stops, I change one setting in the router and I am online again in thirty seconds. A thirty second manual fix beats a system that half works on purpose.
Now the part where I broke it
This is the useful half, so I am not going to skip it.
I gave that box a fixed address by typing the address into the box itself. It felt right at the time. Then I changed routers, and the whole network moved to a new range of addresses. Then it moved again.
The box did not know, because nobody had told it. It started up, put on an address that no longer existed anywhere, and sat there deaf.
It looked completely dead for days. Turning it off and on did nothing, and it took me longer than I want to admit to understand why: restarting it simply made it put the same wrong address back on. There was never anything wrong with the hardware. It was shouting into a room that had been demolished.
Getting back in was the interesting part. I gave a machine that still worked a second address in the old, dead range, so for a few minutes there were two networks living on one wire. That let me reach the stranded box. I also set up a job to undo my own change automatically after three minutes, in case the fix did not work and I locked myself out completely.
Never type a fixed address into the machine itself. The router knows when the network changes. The box in the cupboard does not.
This works on any machine that stays switched on: a very small computer, an old laptop, or something you already run. The whole thing is one installation and one setting in your router. Replace anything in angle brackets with your own value.
1. Install it
What to do: use the project's own installer on a machine that stays on. A setup wizard walks you through it.
The two answers that matter: when it asks which public directory to use, pick a public one and not your router. When it offers to set a fixed address for you, say no, that is the trap in step four.
What should happen: when it finishes it prints a web address and a one-time password. Write both down.
2. Hand it out to the whole network
What this does: this single setting flips the entire house over. In your router's settings, set the directory address it hands out to be your new box.
What should happen: every device picks it up the next time it reconnects. No apps, no setup on each device, nothing for anyone else in the house to learn.
How to check: reconnect a phone, load a page full of adverts, and watch the box's own dashboard fill up.
# Router settings -> LAN or DHCP
DNS server to hand out: <address-of-your-box>3. One directory, no backup, on purpose
What not to do: do not add a second address as a fallback.
Why: devices race the two and use whichever replies first, so some of your traffic skips the filter and adverts get through.
The recovery if it ever fails: change that one field to a public directory, and you are back online in about thirty seconds. Change it back afterwards.
# temporary bypass while you fix it
DNS server to hand out: 1.1.1.14. The mistake. Do not repeat it.
What to avoid: do not type a fixed address into the box itself.
What goes wrong: if your network's address range later changes, the box starts up with an address that no longer exists and goes deaf. Restarting simply reapplies the same dead address.
What to do instead: leave the box set to get its address automatically, and reserve a permanent address for it in the router, matched to the box's own hardware identifier.
# Router settings -> address reservations
reserve: <box-hardware-id> -> <fixed-address>5. If you have already stranded one
Give a working machine a second address in the old, dead range, so it can reach the stranded box. Set the box back to automatic. Then remove the temporary address.
Before you start, set up something that undoes your change after a few minutes. That way a wrong move cannot lock you out for good.
This page in the original Kyber Cypher voice: Kill every ad on your network