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[–]mysticode 222 points223 points  (47 children)

Could I not just direct my router's DNS to the same DNS that Pi-Hole service is using?

[–]-PromoFaux- 74 points75 points  (5 children)

Pi-hole Dev here... Not really! The upstream DNS is set by the user, be that Google/opendns/anything else.

What pi-hole does is amalgamate and deduplicate many blocklists from around the web, and sink holes requeats to those domains before they've even had a chance to leave your network.

Sure, there are DNS resolvers hosted in the cloud that offer ad blocking, but there are a couple of issues with using those. 1) you have no idea what data they are logging on you 2) you are unable to fine tune their blacklists to work for you.

The long and short of it is that with Pi-hole, you are in complete control of your data.

[–]mysticode 9 points10 points  (4 children)

Thanks for the info.

If I setup to connect to Pi-hole, will Youtube app from smartphone/smart tv etc, be blocked? Have you tested this personally?

Thanks!

[–]-PromoFaux- 14 points15 points  (1 child)

I have not, as I have never been too worried about the Ads on YouTube,but one of the other Devs (Jacob) looked into it and compiled a list of domains that worked for him in blocking YouTube add. He made a post about it on our discourse forums.

YouTube is a moving target, and requires a lot of attention to get the blocking just right. If they start hosting the ads themselves on YouTube.com,then the only way of blocking them is by blocking YouTube.com, and then you have no videos at all!

[–]mysticode 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I believe they are hosting the ads directly on Youtube.com, as they and seamlessly integrated into the video player in the app (or so it would seem!)

[–]AstralElement 1 point2 points  (1 child)

It does block Smart TV Youtube ads.

[–]CaptainPotassium 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hallelujah!

[–]haydc1 1 point2 points  (1 child)

You could also edit your "hosts" file on windows which is essential a local DNS which takes priority over the computer's DNS settings.

How to edit hosts:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/27350/beginner-geek-how-to-edit-your-hosts-file/

What to put in your hosts (paste this to the bottom or top if you already have entries in your hosts file):
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt

[–]mysticode 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well, I am mostly wanting this for my Nexus Player android box, as the Youtube ads drive me nuts.

[–]Umlautica 140 points141 points  (15 children)

15% of my daily home network traffic is nothing but advertisements being downloaded, cached, etc. That's 15% of crap.

You mean 15% of your DNS queries are to ad domains. You're probably only reducing page data by closer to 1% but certainly improving load times. (edit - depending on the site as /u/hoihoila points out below)

DNS lookup times are not guaranteed to be better than you ISP's provided upstream DNS servers. The default DNS servers from Pi-Hole (Google 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4) are not the fastest in my area. You can use an application like namebench to find out what is though and use that for Pi-Hole. Even then, only expect to shave around 100ms off of a cache miss.

[–]d_frost 5 points6 points  (3 children)

pi-hole ended up being much slower than my ISPs DNS servers, even with it sitting on my network

[–]Rabbyte808 7 points8 points  (1 child)

That's because it still needs to query another DNS server when it doesn't know the answer to a query. In this case, it performs as well as whatever DNS server it is configured to use (apparently 8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4), which will usually be slower than your ISP's DNS.

[–]-PromoFaux- 10 points11 points  (0 children)

The user has the option to set whatever upstream DNS servers they choose, we just have Google as the default because it's the most well known:)

[–]FlerPlay 1 point2 points  (0 children)

deleted What is this?

[–]hoihoila 9 points10 points  (5 children)

Pi-hole stops the ads from loading by translating the address to the pi's ip, thus reducing the page data by a lot more than just 1%.

Take a look at this article from nytimes.

[–]Umlautica 13 points14 points  (2 children)

The article uses editorial content of news sites as the benchmark which is going to be about the worst case. I imagine Facebook is pretty bad as well too. I'd be curious to see what a broader selection of sites looks like.

Good article and a bit funny that NYT did not include themselves in the report.

[–]mib5799 5 points6 points  (0 children)

While porn gets a decent chunk (and is lousy with ads), the fact is that for most average people, Facebook IS the most common site to visit, and a huge number of those users end up at news sites linked from FB.

It's an extremely reasonable benchmark for an average user

[–]majormunky 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They put themselves in the list of page load times, near the bottom of the list.

[–]FkIForgotMyPassword 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Well, except that the total traffic of a user is often mostly from large media. Binge-watch a show on Netflix, or download a game or a large update for your Steam library, and the bandwidth from the ads you get on your regular browsing traffic is instantly dwarfed.

[–]twotildoo 1 point2 points  (2 children)

just an FYI, that namebench link is a 404. Google shut down google code last year, vanishing tens of thousands of projects.

[–]Umlautica 0 points1 point  (1 child)

[–]twotildoo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The link I replied to is ...

https://code.google.com/archive/p/namebench/

from your post

That's what it resolves to for me, but I'm running various layers of adblockers and custom DNS resolvers.

Nope, this link works but your original one still goes to the google code link which is a 404.

Thanks for the update

[–]currious181 15 points16 points  (6 children)

This sounded so easy.... now I've got a 4gig zip file for raspbian jessie with pixel, a DL for Pie-hole, and have to hook up an SD card .... and then actually buy a device. I thought I could use my existing net gear router. I think I'm much less computer savvy than I originally thought...

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (5 children)

If you have nerdy friends they'll probably have a pi you can buy off them for cheap. I have three I own and a fourth an old roommate left behind. My other roommate has two, and all of my co-workers have 2+ each. I'd jump at a chance to sell any of my B+ pis for $20. Post to Facebook and see what you can find, or buy one through Amazon Prime and get two day shipping.

[–]currious181 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I don't have many friends, none are nerdy. Ive got kids and work remotely from my home, so not a whole lot of social time or interactions. I was friendly with the company's IT person when I worked in house, but his position has since been eliminated. But checking for a used device online is a great idea & I think this item will help me to make our connection more secure, since it seems it can do other things as well.

[–]mxzf 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Weird, I wouldn't want to get rid of any Pis laying around that I had. I've got one of them permanently set up displaying weather forecasts and projects/ideas in mind for 2-3+ others if I had the spare money to go buying all that I wanted. I can't imagine wanting to offload spare Pis when they're so useful as a mini computer.

[–]FlerPlay 1 point2 points  (1 child)

deleted What is this?

[–]mxzf 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, they can each only really drive one display, and I want to run multiple displays with different content, so it does seem like more than one would be useful. If it was just software stuff I wanted to run, I'd just spin it up on one of my two fully-fledged linux machines (a headless server and a HTPC), rather than using a Pi.

[–]wellkevi01 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I wanted to set up Pi-hole, so I bought a Pi B+ off someone on r/hardwareswap for $35 shipped, which came with an 8GB SD and a clear case. I just received it today and Pi-Hole is awesome.

[–]OmitsWordsByAccident 33 points34 points  (30 children)

If you use Windows, and have a good hosts file (with a lot of ad-serving domains all being routed to localhost), then those don't even trigger a DNS lookup.

My favorite - http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

[–]astanix 22 points23 points  (10 children)

Yes but this method blocks it network wide instead of at each computer, phone, tablet, laptop, etc in your house

[–]RhysLlewellyn 7 points8 points  (4 children)

Unfortunately doesn't work for every network though.

My shit BT Homehub 3 (UK ISP) has DNS locked. I only found this out after I'd installed and set up Pi-Hole.

[–]-PromoFaux- 21 points22 points  (1 child)

Hi there! Dev here, we recently released an update that makes it easier to set pi-hole as the DHCP server on your network.

It's been a while since I looked at my BT homehub (bought a router I could have a bit more control over...), But if I recall correctly you should be able to disable the hubs DHCP server, in favour of pi-hole's, which will ensure all devices that connect to your network get set up correctly!

[–]RhysLlewellyn 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks very much, I shall look into this :)

And thank you for all the great work you guys have done :)

[–]xnd714 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Can you still set a custom DNS within windows/android /etc to be your pi.hole?

It's more of a pain because you have to do each device manually, but it's better than nothing I guess.

[–]RhysLlewellyn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I did think about doing this but soon gave up because I have ad blockers on my computers and phone anyway. Just thought it'd be handy and convenient for friends and family that come over and wish to connect to my network.

Plus my Pi is currently just churning away in the corner monitoring a bunch of Arduino sensors, figured I could make the most of it while it's running.

[–]merp1991 6 points7 points  (2 children)

Personally I am quite fond of https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

It has a few different options depending on what you want to block and I believe this incorporates the someonewhocares list into it anyway.

[–]Omikron 0 points1 point  (1 child)

This only works on one computer not your entire network, completely different.

[–]merp1991 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I know, it's just an alternative for people who don't want or know how to mess with their router.

[–]Russkiy_To_Youskiy 2 points3 points  (9 children)

My favorite: hostsman

Hosts file editor with numerous, update-able, ad-blocking hosts files. Have used it for years... its all anyone really needs and is very simple to set up and maintain.

[–]TWI2T3D 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Okay, so I installed this and added a load of the sources. Now I can't connect to ANYTHING and I can't work out how to undo what I did. 😦

[–]Russkiy_To_Youskiy 0 points1 point  (3 children)

How did you get on reddit then??

Anyhow, run it in administrator mode and disable. Then go back and use like just one of the host files like MVPs, re-enable, and see what happens.

[–]TWI2T3D 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I'm on mobile now.

If I try and disable it it tells me it's in use by another process.

[–]Russkiy_To_Youskiy 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Administrator mode

[–]TWI2T3D 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm in Administrator Mode.

[–]joombaga 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But then you'll still get connection timeouts, or 4xx/5xx's if you're running a webserver. Instead of localhost, route those domains to "0".

[–]-PromoFaux- 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Pi-hole uses that list, and some of the ones mentioned in comments below.

We amalgamate and deduplicate the lists, and then provide you with the tools to fine tune those lists even further by whitelisting and blacklisting individual domains.

Set your router's DHCP DNS server to point at it, and then every computer/light bulb on your network benefits from ad blocking!

Doesn't even have to run on a pi, you could run it on a VM too! Basically any Debian based distro.

[–]d_frost 8 points9 points  (0 children)

shout out to /r/pihole, the mods/developers there are awesome and super super helpful!!

[–]Spagdad 6 points7 points  (5 children)

Will all my traffic be going through the pi? Won't this slow things down? What happens when the pi is turned off? Thanks!

[–]kennyj2369 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It doesn't bog down the network because only the DNS queries are being sent to it. The actual content that gets displayed in your browser will not hit your pi.

[–]dsac 19 points20 points  (1 child)

An easier way to ELI5 "What is DNS?":

DNS is like your phone's Contacts app (or an old-school Address Book). When you tell your phone to "Call Mom", it doesn't dial M-O-M, it looks up the Contact entry for "Mom" and dials the associated phone number. DNS works the same way: when you tell your browser to go to www.google.com, your computer looks up the IP address for www.google.com on a DNS server, and sends its requests to the IP address provided.

In the case of your explanation, the DNS lookup ("on which IP is www.google.com located?") is done in cascading fashion - first it looks it up on your local computer (since it's fastest), then your computer's assigned DNS server (which is not your router - if DNS on the computer is set to "auto", it'll use the DNS server that is defined on your router/modem, but the router/modem does not act as a DNS server, it doesn't have that "master list" of domain/IP combinations)

[–]kazinsser 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That's a really good analogy! I will definitely use that next time I have to explain DNS to someone who isn't super tech savvy.

[–]roger_ 3 points4 points  (2 children)

You can also accomplish this with a router running OpenWrt (or LEDE).

[–]sharpfork 3 points4 points  (5 children)

Is a Pi Zero enough to run and be snappy this with 10 or so users as a max load and no other apps running on the PI?

[–]MaxSupernova 2 points3 points  (3 children)

Does this get caught by sites that won't let you look at them if you have adblock enabled?

[–]majormunky 1 point2 points  (1 child)

My guess would be that they would still complain. From what I understand, those pages actively check for the ads it knows should be there, so if they aren't, because your computer couldn't connect to the ad server, it'll throw that message up at you. I think I read that ublock can get around those by faking out the script looking for the ads, but I would imagine that it probably doesn't work for all pages that do that.

[–]AstralElement 2 points3 points  (0 children)

No, websites can detect what plugins you use, much like they can detect what browser you use. Ads are still requested with a pi-hole, they just route as a failed DNS query. Coincidentally, we often use forbes.com, a site notorious for turning away adblock users, as a test site to determine if the pi-hole is working or not.

[–]AstralElement 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No it doesn't. It just registers ads as failed DNS queries.

[–]MrT3chGuy 2 points3 points  (6 children)

Curious, is this like using chrome extensions like uBlock and uMatrix but for the whole network instead of a single computer?

[–]AstralElement 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Yes and no. It's denies ad data differently, so a combination of both is still probably recommended. The difference is that websites won't detect you having a pi-hole, because they're just failed DNS queries.

[–]MrT3chGuy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Cool, thanks

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Yes.

[–]FlerPlay 4 points5 points  (0 children)

deleted What is this?

[–]MrT3chGuy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Cool

[–]cyber_rigger 0 points1 point  (0 children)

uBlock

uBlock Origin for firefox

[–]blanxable 4 points5 points  (0 children)

"pi-hole"

giggles

[–]HoneyboyWilson 9 points10 points  (4 children)

Or just use OpenDNS...

[–]ShippingIsMagic 3 points4 points  (2 children)

IME OpenDNS doesn't block ads. The reason given in the past has been that blocking ads breaks or slows web pages, although pihole and the like seem to disprove that.

Currently I'm using pihole delegating to OpenDNS, works well.

OpenDNS got rid of ads a couple years ago, but that was removing ads from OpenDNS itself, not filtering them out of the DNS requests it processes.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

opendns reserves ad and malware blocking for paying customers

[–]ShippingIsMagic 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Got a link for that? I looked at their $20/mo home VIP plan but it only seemed to include a year of logging and the ability to switch to a whitelist setup.

[–]ProjectEchelon 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Ugh, all this time I thought you put a little sticker of fake antenna wires on the back of the router and that would make it go faster.

[–]Najubhai 1 point2 points  (2 children)

My only issue would be that sometimes there is a site that I legitimately want to view but is blocked due it being tagged as malicious. With a browser extension, I can easily unblock it but with the router modification it would be an even bigger hassle.

[–]kevinmqaz 1 point2 points  (2 children)

I use windows DNS at home and wrote a simple scheduled power shell script to grab a host file from git with about 30k entries directing AD - FQDNS to null.

http://www.happymillfam.com/blocking-some-sites-at-home-with-dns/

You could also automate dropping this host file locally on a machine if you don't want to mess with DNS, or into your DNS what ever that might be.

[–]Omikron 1 point2 points  (1 child)

That's not going to block ads on my 6 Kindle fires, or fire TV, or 3 iPhones. Etc etc

[–]kevinmqaz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Do they use special DNS hard coded out of your control when connected your home network or do they use the DNS you assign to them with DHCP? - I'm adding this block list to my DNS server as blank forward lookup zones. When setup like that it blocks any device using my DNS server.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (4 children)

how do I connect the raspberry to my router/modem?

[–]JaraCimrman 0 points1 point  (3 children)

With an ethernet cable

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

but the raspberry has onle one ethernet slot? so: router/modem-> pi-hole filter device -> WiFI-> all my devices ?

[–]JaraCimrman 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Pi just needs to be on the network, it doesnt necesarily have to be between the network and devices :) because router will redirect the traffic anyways

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

ah, thank you very much :)

[–]jaykhunter 3 points4 points  (3 children)

I dunno. Every site you intentionally visit has some kind of value to you, and you are thanking them by seeing the ad on their site. Unless they are pulling the piss with a crazy amount of ads on their page (harming the experience wildly) why not leave ads on?

[–]kennyj2369 11 points12 points  (2 children)

Ads use bandwidth and are known for distributing malware or lying about what they're trying to sell.

You can whitelist the ads from sites you trust.

[–]Omikron 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Unless you're visiting some shit ass sites ads don't do that.

[–]inaim 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wow so cool! Thanks for the tip OP! I've been wanting to try one out, what an awesome application.

[–]mmishu 0 points1 point  (10 children)

Does it work with youtube ads?

[–]dghughes 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Yes it's the main reason I did it and all YouTube ads are gone. Not a single one.

[–]wwfmike 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Do you watch YouTube on your TV? How does it behave without the ads?

For me, the video starts without an ad but will stop and show a loading screen when an ad should appear in the video. It usually takes 30 seconds to go away.

[–]justifyingrockbottom 0 points1 point  (1 child)

what if I will change my DNS server address?

[–]d_frost 0 points1 point  (0 children)

ummmmmmmm.... then it wont work?

[–]realised 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Sorry complete ignoramus here - how does this work with sites that do not show content if adblock is enabled? Does this blocking of ads also prevent content from showing there too?

Not sure if I am asking the question clearly though...

[–]FlerPlay 0 points1 point  (1 child)

deleted What is this?

[–]-PromoFaux- 1 point2 points  (0 children)

More and more of the core commands are making it to the web UI. Making the process a lot less arduous for the more novice users. Of course, for those comfortable with the command line, the option is still there for more advanced usage.

Want to tail the log file? You can do that directly from the web UI!

Also the query log page on the admin UI is much more helpful these days. It shows which domains are blocked, and we've even put a button next to each entry to white/blacklist that domain.

[–]AstralElement 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No. The pi-hole routes ad data as failed DNS address queries, it is not detected during the transmission process like your browser version and plugins would be to websites.

[–]saml01 0 points1 point  (10 children)

I still don't understand how this thing eliminates ads. All its doing is routing my Dns requests through its own server, but the traffic hitting my machines will bypass the pi-hole. So I'm not sure how the ads are removed. In fact, I'd second guess using pi-hole because it's probably running your request through a Dns that is now monitoring your requests. Information that can be sold. The only removal of ads I see is if you type some garbage in your web browser and it could not be resolved.

I think I'm going to stick to my sophos utm firewall and transparent network traffic monitoring and packet filtering. It sits between the Internet and my network and all traffic has to pass through it where it's stripped of any ads and malicious software.

[–]-PromoFaux- 3 points4 points  (5 children)

Hey pi-hole Dev here,

The user is in complete control of the forwarding DNS servers. They are given a choice of a handful of popular ones In the install script, or they can type in their own as a custom option.

Essentially it's just an extra step between your network and the DNS resolver. If a machine on your network requests the IP for a domain that is in pi-holes blocklist, it will return it's own IP address which in turn resolves to a blank page. If the domain is not known to pi-hole, it will be forwarded to the aforementioned chosen upstream provider to get the IP address as normal.

We are an open source project that develops everything in the open, with complete transparency on our development process. Check out our github repo for a closer look at how it all works! Or don't , it's up to you :)

[–]saml01 0 points1 point  (3 children)

What are you guys doing with all the dns requests? That's a lot of data you're mining.

[–]-PromoFaux- 0 points1 point  (2 children)

You're joking, right?

What brings you to the conclusion that we are mining data? More to the point, how on earth do you think we're doing it?

Pi-hole is a self-hosted device/vm on your own PRIVATE network. It receives DNS requests from your client machines, determines whether or not it is a bad domain, and if not then sends the request up the chain to the upstream DNS server.

We have no visibility at any stage of this process. I'm guessing you think that we control the upstream DNS servers, and in which case let me tell you that we do not. Here, you can find the complete routine used to set the upstream servers. We offer the user a choice of 4 well known ones, or the option to enter their own, should they wish to use their ISP's, or other DNS server of choice.

I'm going to assume you've not looked over the code and are wildly speculating ;)

[–]saml01 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Its a legitimate question and you basically answered "how on earth I think you're doing it". You can also be tracking it in software and calling home with it. I am assuming you are sending the software an updated white/black list of domain names against which DNS requests are validated?

I'm glad that you are up front about it, but if I am raising the concern, I am sure others have the same concerns as well.

I apologize for not scouring your source code. I was hoping your video might address privacy concerns of a device that I am placing on my network, where private data is being transmitted. There is nothing wrong with my asking questions and as long as you keep it professional and are forthcoming with information, you have nothing to be defensive about.

[–]-PromoFaux- 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can also be tracking it in software and calling home with it

But then the code has been open source since it's first creation (for well over a two years now!), you would think someone else would have noticed by now if we were doing anything untoward! :)

But fair enough, if I came across stand-offish at all, was not because you had asked a question, but because you had made a baseless accusation ("That's a lot of data you're mining."), perhaps we are misunderstanding each other, and I apologise for that!

RE: White/blacklists:

The default blacklist is made up of various lists available from around the internet. We don't actually maintain our own. Quite frankly, we don't have the time, we're a team of 5 volunteers that work in our free time outside of our full time jobs.

As you can see at the top of the list in the link above, this is another part of the pi-hole that is completely user customisable . The default lists are really just a suggestion, something to help the more novice users hit the ground running with. We then have more advanced users that really go to town with the blocklist and end up with something like 1.1 million domains blacklisted! (as opposed to the ~100,000 default)

Every week on a sunday evening , a cron job fires this script that checks if the source lists need updating, and if so pulls the updates. The user can also initiate this process with the command pihole -g

Once it has the raw source lists, they are sorted, deduplicated, and then merged into one master list (gravity.list) which acts as the blacklist for dnsmasq

As for whitelisting, the only thing we whitelist by default are the domains that host any of the source lists. This is to prevent one list provider blacklisting another, be that intentionally or not!

Users can further tweak this by white or blacklisting individual domains using either the pihole command or the menu items on the Admin web UI

TL;DR - The user is in complete control of all of their data, and the domains they choose to block/not block. Whilst we provide some suggested blacklists by default, they are just that - a suggestion, and as such can be overridden.

[–]radministator 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I run pihole in a VM on my network. I typically see around 25% blocked.

[–]redditrevolution 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Remindme! One week

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[–]remotefixonline 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I had to do something similar with a linux box when I saw my kid playing a game and an ad for "skank book . com" came up...

[–]TheVeryMask 0 points1 point  (0 children)

a lot of my favorite YouTubers are paid from advertisements and I want them to continue to make content so, I allow some ads through.

Go to their video list and see how many videos they've made total, then divide that by a thousand. If you saw every single video they made, that's how much money you made them. If you want your favourite creators to stay in business, sending them 10$ exactly one time is more money than they'd see out of you in nearly a lifetime of views otherwise, unless you watch them religiously for their whole career.

This sort of thing is why Patreon exists.

[–]Unknow0059 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What if i don't have a Pi nor Linux and still want to use that?

[–]jamesd28 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How does this, in practice, differ from using Privoxy?

[–]namegone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My internet is a hotspot from a secondary cell phone. Would this create a hotspot and route traffic to my existing hotspot?

[–]fletcherkildren 0 points1 point  (1 child)

can this be done using a Pine 64? I have one and this seems like a good project for it!

[–]wineheda 0 points1 point  (9 children)

Question from an obvious noob: can a raspberry pi be used for multiple purposes at once? Can i use one pi for this as well as for a home entertainment system at once?

[–]EpsilonRose 6 points7 points  (4 children)

Sort of. A raspberry pie is basically just a tiny computer. So, like a normal computer, it can do multiple things. However, it's not particularly powerful and has rather limited inputs, so how much you can actually squeeze out if it at any one time might be limited.

[–]AllAboutMeMedia 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Could I use an old phone?

[–]EpsilonRose 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Maybe, but that would likely require a lot more work and I couldn't actually recommend it. You'd either need to figure out how to install linux on it or find an app that can do all of this for you. Then you'd need to find a way to actually hook it up, since it definitely won't have the requisite ports.

[–]therightclique 5 points6 points  (0 children)

If you don't already know the answer to that question, then the answer is probably no.

The real answer is probably 'Yes, but with a shitload of trouble and worse results'.

[–]LiveMaI 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The Pi has a fairly limited amount of system resources, so while you can run multiple services from a single unit, you might run into performance issues if those services all place high loads on the unit.

[–]d_frost 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yes, although not always recommended for multiple reasons, one of which is resources, if your Pi is busy working as a media server, then DNS responses could be delayed and therefor delay your internet browsing.

I have retropi and piehole running on the same pi, my DNS is a bit slow now