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Adhole, the Massive Public Pi-hole Instance, Shuts Down (neowin.net) 32

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
segaboy81 writes: I've been running Pihole for years (for myself), but this guy was running one for everybody! Since 2017, those not so savvy who still wanted the experience of Pi-hole, could turn to Adhole.org. That is, until now. Adhole.org is shutting down, citing issues with maintenance and stability
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Adhole, the Massive Public Pi-hole Instance, Shuts Down More

Adhole, the Massive Public Pi-hole Instance, Shuts Down

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  • Just how "savvy" did one need to be to run Pi-hole?

    • Re:But it's EASY! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Sique ( 173459 ) on Thursday January 13, 2022 @03:02PM (#62170561) Homepage
      You have to be able to set up a server, to administer a server, install a service on that server and administer that service.

      This is something you have to be a professional or at least a dedicated hobbyist for.

      To use Pi-Hole via Adhole.org, you just have to ask someone else to change your internet settings once. This is a lot easier.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        This is something you have to be a professional or at least a dedicated hobbyist for.

        Dafuq? All you have to do is buy a Pi, download and write the image to SD, answer a few questions and modify your DNS in the router.

        • Re:But it's EASY! (Score:4, Funny)

          by dnaumov ( 453672 ) on Thursday January 13, 2022 @03:53PM (#62170745)

          This is something you have to be a professional or at least a dedicated hobbyist for.

          Dafuq? All you have to do is buy a Pi, download and write the image to SD, answer a few questions and modify your DNS in the router.

          What you just wrote would entirely fly over the heads of 95%+ of all computer users.

          Dafuq, indeed.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by EvilSS ( 557649 )

          This is something you have to be a professional or at least a dedicated hobbyist for.

          Dafuq? All you have to do is buy a Pi, download and write the image to SD, answer a few questions and modify your DNS in the router.

          Gee is that all? I'll just go let grandma know what she need to do! So simple!

        • All you have to do is buy a Pi, download and write the image to SD, answer a few questions and modify your DNS in the router.

          You forgot one important step: Be able to diagnose and resolve problems when your PiHole setup accidentally breaks legitimate sites, or glitches and causes breakage across lots of sites. It doesn't happen often, but when it does happen it can be a major PITA to even narrow down what the problem is, let alone how to fix it. Dealing with that takes a lot more technical knowledge than setting up a Pi.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Probably not a great idea to let some random dude control your DNS lookups though.

        For most people installing uBlock Origin is probably the best advice. It's easy and more effective than DNS blocking.

        • Browser-based blocking like uBlock Origin is great for the desktop and even for mobile browsers, but not an option for blocking in-app advertising on mobile devices as well as ads on devices like game consoles and streaming sticks. I think thatâ(TM)s the point of this.

    • Stfu, unless you can talk your grandma on how to setup over the phone then no its not that easy and the vast majority of people don't have the technical chops to do this.

    • ISP provided restricted router/modems causes a huge problem setting up a PI-hole. I originally was fine with the shitty provided all-in-one device and it was fine for running simple servers and generally doing home router stuff. However within a year after I moved I started building out the network and it is effectively kneecapped in functionality to prevent non-"savvy" people from breaking things. Simple things such as VLANs, default DNS servers for the network and port forwarding were locked behind ISP

    • You're the reason 2022 won't be The Year of Desktop Linux either...

  • Burnout, I guess? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dskoll ( 99328 ) on Thursday January 13, 2022 @02:44PM (#62170519) Homepage

    I'm surprised anyone would take on such a task, especially offering it for free... that's a ton of work. The person who ran it must have been very dedicated.

    It's not that hard to run your own Pi-hole instance, though, and when you only have one customer, the support burden is way less.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jrumney ( 197329 )
      But think of the value of all the data you can collect being a man-in-the-middle for all those dumb users.

    • Just a naive person who thought it would be cool. I would have done the same 20 years ago. But after gaining a lot of experience over the last couple decades I wouldn't touch something like this without major financial backing.

      • What you're supposed to do is 1) sell DNS services to companies worried about ads being as an attack vector 2) offer the same for free (without support) to the internet user, and monetize the data. But only certain people have profile to engage into business activities. There are lots of free services on the internet and somehow these companies survive, so there is a way.

  • If the blurb gives no idea what the subject is about, I'm even less inclined to RTFA...

  • Really? (Score:5, Funny)

    by TWX ( 665546 ) on Thursday January 13, 2022 @03:11PM (#62170577)

    Really? They shut their Pi-hole?!

  • I've been running pihole for a few years. Love it. Until recently.

    I used to use chrome, but chrome started doing dns over https - which means my pihole was being bypassed. Then I switched to Brave. Now Brave seems to be doing the same thing - and pihole is less effective.

    Have others noticed this? And found a solution?

    • In principle you could deactivate DoH it in the Security options, but I can confirm you still get ads (even with the ungoogled-chromium patchset).

      I use firefox, it complies with its own settings and does not use DoH if you tell it not to. I have that plus /etc/hosts file, and get absolute zero ads ever.

      Another option if you want chrome could be blacklisting the google IP ranges by packet filtering, so that it can't establish connection to google DNS services. Of course that means large breakage of google se

  • Seems a shame commercial and ad substitution is NOT going on.Rather then direct the ad to the bitbucket - you could substitute or promote somebody else to the #1 position. Make no mistake, advertisers would sue the shit out of you. Once there was a grand final football match. Live on-field banners, logos and hoardings were with computer magic replaced by something else - and you would not know it. I think Beer and cigarette names were scrubbed. That was over 5 years ago, so live streaming can certainty rep
  • There's NextDNS which kinda does the same thing if you aren't inclined in hosting your own PiHole.

  • This server is potentially a huge data source for Internet user behavior data. Someone can get value from running this thing.

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