I said in my other thread, the one where i am dying, i would put up a thread about pihole and why everyone should use it. So here it is.
What is pihole, well its an application that can reduce, will reduce you coming across adverts and malicious pages/ads and all sorts of utter bollox on web pages these days.
Think of it like a network wide automatic version of addblock. But this works on everything, including pcs, tablets, phones and even those useless Apple isheep devices that you normally cant put add blockers on.
So how does it do it, well its a dns server. Dns ... er the basics.. of it.. is like a sort of telephone directory for web pages. It converts domain names like "www.mutantscottishwillys.co.uk" into ip addresses that locate the site on the internet.
For instance www.bbc.co.uk is really 212.58.244.66, google.com is 216.58.204.14 ect ect.. Right now the IT folk on here are prob doing back flips but you get the picture.
Anyway pihole acts as a separate DNS server on your own home network, when your browser goes to say a site that is blacklisted by pihole it will basically return a message saying go do one.. well sort of. What this does is stops your computer from reaching dodgy sites, or being redirected by ad frames or web site contents to known pain in the arse addresses.
And there are thousands of addresses that can be used with the easily available block lists.
What this also does apart from keep you a bit safer on the internet is make browsing a fair bit faster, you would be really surprised if you saw just how much in a typical web page is redirected to other sites for content (adds, picture hosting, shite like that) - so with your own bouncer on the front door to you homes internet refusing stuff right there and then you get a much faster browsing experience.
So how do you set up pihole, well i will come to that bit if enough folk are interested below. Ohh and when i have typed up the details.
But yes you really do want to run it.