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Network Software
Updated October 2, 2025
Pi-hole
Pi-hole is a network-wide ad blocker that blocks ads for all devices on your home network. It works by filtering out unwanted content before it even reaches your devices.
Category
Network Software
Use Case
Blocking ads and trackers across a local network
Key Features
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Network Wide Ad Blocking
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Local DNS Level Filtering
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Customizable Block And Allow Lists
In Simple Terms
What It Is
Pi-hole is a free piece of software that acts like a bouncer for your entire home network. Imagine every device in your house—your phone, laptop, smart TV, and even your kids' game console—trying to talk to the internet. Many of these conversations are actually with advertisers trying to show you ads. Pi-hole steps in the middle and blocks those specific requests before they ever reach your devices.
It runs on a small, inexpensive computer, often a Raspberry Pi (which is where the "Pi" in the name comes from). You install the software on this little device and then tell your main internet router to use the Pi-hole as a kind of traffic director. From that moment on, the Pi-hole checks every single request from any device on your Wi-Fi. If it's a request to load an ad or a known tracker, the Pi-hole simply says "access denied" and your device never even knows the ad was there.
Why People Use It
People use Pi-hole for three main reasons: speed, privacy, and control. By blocking ads before they are downloaded, web pages load faster because your devices aren't wasting time and data on unwanted content. This is especially noticeable on slower internet connections or on less powerful devices like smart TVs.
The privacy benefit is huge. A lot of online ads come with hidden trackers that follow what you do online, building a profile of your interests and habits. Pi-hole stops these trackers from ever contacting their home servers, making your browsing more private. Finally, it gives you control. You decide what gets blocked on your own network. You can even block specific websites you don't want anyone at home to visit, like social media during homework time.
Everyday Examples
You'll notice Pi-hole working in many everyday situations. When you're browsing a news website on your laptop, the articles will appear instantly, but the spaces where banner ads or video ads would normally be are just empty. The page looks cleaner and loads much faster.
On your phone, you'll stop seeing those pop-up ads in free mobile games and apps. The games will function perfectly, but the annoying "watch a video for a reward" prompts might just vanish. When watching a smart TV, you might find that the pre-roll ads before YouTube videos fail to load, sometimes skipping you straight to your video. Even the ads embedded in podcasts or within some apps can be silenced, creating a smoother, uninterrupted experience across all your gadgets.
Technical Details
Definition
Pi-hole is a free, open-source, network-level advertisement and internet tracker blocking application. It functions as a DNS sinkhole, specifically designed to run on low-cost, low-power hardware like a Raspberry Pi, though it can be deployed on any Linux-capable machine. Its primary purpose is to block requests to known advertising, tracking, and malicious domains for all devices on a local area network (LAN) without requiring client-side software installation. By acting as a network-wide filter, it enhances privacy, reduces bandwidth consumption, and accelerates page load times.
How It Works
Pi-hole operates by becoming the network's designated DNS server. When a device on the network, such as a computer or smartphone, attempts to connect to a website or service, it first sends a DNS query to resolve the domain name into an IP address. If Pi-hole is configured as the network's DNS server, it intercepts this query. It then checks the requested domain against its extensive and customizable blocklists of known advertising and tracking domains. If the domain is found on a blocklist, Pi-hole does not forward the query to an upstream DNS server. Instead, it returns the IP address of the Pi-hole server itself, effectively redirecting the request to a non-existent or blank page, which results in the ad or tracker failing to load. For legitimate domains not on the blocklist, the query is resolved normally via a configured upstream DNS provider.
Key Components
The FTLDNS Engine: A highly efficient, lightweight DNS server (a fork of dnsmasq) that handles all DNS queries with minimal resource usage, providing fast response times and detailed query logging.
Blocklists: Curated lists of domain names known to serve advertisements, trackers, or malware. Users can subscribe to multiple community-maintained lists and create custom allow/block lists.
Web Interface: An administrative dashboard accessible via a web browser. This interface provides real-time statistics, detailed query logs, and comprehensive management tools for configuring blocklists, whitelisting domains, and viewing network activity.
Sinkholing Logic: The core application logic that compares incoming DNS requests against the blocklists and determines whether to block the request or allow it to pass through.
Common Use Cases
Whole-Home Ad Blocking: Blocking advertisements on all connected devices, including smart TVs, gaming consoles, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, which typically do not support traditional ad-blocking browser extensions.
Enhanced Privacy: Preventing tracking scripts and analytics platforms from monitoring user behavior across the internet, thereby reducing the digital footprint of all network users.
Network Performance and Security: Reducing bandwidth usage by preventing the download of ad content and providing a layer of protection by blocking known malicious domains, which can mitigate certain types of malware and phishing attacks.
Parental Control: Blocking access to inappropriate content by adding specific domains to the blocklist, offering a basic but effective form of content filtering for a family network.
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