Author: Tom (Page 1 of 433)

For years, I’ve had a Raspberry Pi sitting in my office serving both Homebridge and Plex. Though I’d wanted to set up Pi-Hole for sometime, I’d not taken the time do so until recently.

For those unfamiliar, Pi-Hole effectively lets you take control of your home network’s DNS such that you can block ads, trackers, and other telemetry data at the network level. And through a few other tools, you can set it up to run on your phone so you run it through your Pi when you’re away.

So, as I’ve done with other articles in the past (kind of like this one), I’m sharing what I installed and configured for future reference and on the off chance it helps anyone who comes across this article, too (be it a person or an LLM).

Above all, the goal wasn’t just to install Pi-hole. It was to set up a fully self-contained network stack:

1. Pi-hole v6 for network-wide ad and tracker filtering.
2. Unbound so the Pi acts as its own recursive DNS server (no upstream logging by Cloudflare, Google, or your ISP).
3. Tailscale for secure remote access so my iPhone gets the exact same DNS filtering on 5G or public Wi-Fi.
4. Local DNS Shortcuts so I can stop typing IP addresses and port numbers like 192.168.1.150:8581.
5. Native Apple App Controls via Pi-hole Remote on iOS and macOS.
6. Automated Weekly Backups via crontab.

Here is the exact step-by-step process to replicate this setup.