I was up the other night and browsing the web and I had a really annoying ad pop up on a page I was trying to read. I have used the various plugins for Chrome and Firefox that block ads yet a lot of sites detect them and force you to whitelist them. I was then struck by the idea of finding if there was some sort of proxy type of app that would work.

I used to have a really cool application called AdSubtract that installed on your system and then set itself up as a local proxy that was capable of stripping ads off of web pages. I was curious to see if there was some sort of newer application that had this same functionality.

This is where I stumbled across pi-hole. ( https://pi-hole.net/ ) This really sparked my interest and I found it will install and run on Linux, I quickly spun up a new Linux VM on my server and began tinkering away. I got pi-hole installed in about 20-30 minutes. Once it was running I set its IP Address as the DNS for one of my test desktop VM’s and the internet just became a whole new wonderful experience.

Now the network engineer in me began wondering how I could deploy this in various configurations both at home and if it would be capable of running on a Small Business network or even in the Enterprise. Now I am having fun tinkering in my test lab with a new toy.