Orange Pi-hole

If you don’t know, Pi-Hole is a small operating system /software based on Linux used to block online adverts. It’s brilliant when installed on a Raspberry pi. I used to have a pi-hole but it was on an actual raspberry-pi zero which I ended up repurposing to make a Pwnagochi.

Raspberry Pis -of any variety- are hard to come by at the moment. With the global chip shortages. The few available are selling for multiples of the original price. So when I discovered there was an alternative to the raspberry pi zero, but with the bonus of having a physical network port. It was then I decided, I could have an advert-free internet browsing experience in my life again, and a new variety of single board computers to boot.

Orange Pi’s website has an Armbian image, ready for this board, so it was a case of downloading the image to a microSD card and powering it up. Ssh in, run the pi-hole installer after setting static IP for it on the network.

I tested it with just a laptop on my network and set its DNS settings to the IP of the orange-pi. Adverts were blocked and the query log on the pi-hole’s web GUI reflected all is well. So I then changed the settings on my firewall for my home network to use the pi-hole for external DNS lookups.