Block ADS On The Internet For Your Entire Family
→ Pi-Hole is a great way to protect your entire home from ads → Invest your thanks here: https://patreon.com/LinuxRenaissance Make sure to motivate me for more content by, at least, liking the vide...
I second the Tailscale recommendation. It was easy and has spoiled me. I notice immediately if I’m browsing my phone at work and I’m not connected to my pihole lol
You have your Pihole setup at work?
Nah they're connecting to their home network via a Tailscale exit node which basically runs all your requests traffic through your device/router at home/ external server, P2P encrypted.
And if it's got an adblocker on that network you soon notice if it's not connected since all the ads come flooding in.
I too third Tailscale, since it is literally now saving me money because work has give us pretty darn fast WiFi albeit with a nanny filter which the above exit node breaks you out of so I now don't pay for as much data on my cellular plan.
Neat, I will have to check that out! I'm guessing you can't enable it on locked down work devices, however.
That'd be dependent on your works IT policy and I can hear the resounding NO from my IT dept here at home :/
However if they're fairly lax, you could install it on anything from a Pi to a spare laptop.
Besides like I say it's now saving me money, I've also got the bonus of having off site backup storage at a family member's now since I gave them an old Pi4 of mine, setup the arrrr stack/Jellyfin/Jellyseerr etc and they love me so much now because of that, I don't think they'd even notice they're secretly part of my 3.2.1 backup solution (since they also get my remote IT support + their adblocker on their phone via Tailscale anywhere) ;)
As a noob who is only moderately tech savvy, how can I get started with selfhosting? Is it worth just buying a Pi to mess around with at first?
Yup!
Things you should be aware of thou are a Rpi3 and below only have a 100Mbps ethernet port, whereas a Pi4 and above have gigabit ports so if you're gonna be doing anything network related it might be better for you. A Pi5 again has one but then isn't as powerful GPU wise (sounds weird I know) and no good for transcoding things unlike the Pi4.
And saying that, I have two dinky Pi Zero's with DVB HAT's on them to give me my own HD Homerun TV tuners that I can access anywhere via Tailscale. They don't require much processing power and only operate over WiFi 2.4GhZ, but they work good.
If you want something to play with self hosting? Immich is a good start as the docs are as good as Tailscale's. A Pihole is often a good start to understanding your network better and allows installation via a simple curl command. Have fun!
Thank you, I'll take a look at those!
Ya know reading my comment again, something else I might advise is getting to know Docker if you haven't already.
However I find it shrewd to run anything networking related such as Pihole / TS / Zerotier / Adguard whatever is to run them raw dawg instead of in docker containers. Many recommended but I can't.
I've totally and others have too fugged up their network and not just with them in a docker containers. It's really sometimes very very opaque as to why things don't work.
https://joshrnoll.com/my-tailscale-dns-woes/
Immich and stuff like that is great in docker containers, but networking? No thank u!
I haven't - thanks for the tip! I've mostly been running Kubuntu vanilla, aside from changing some DNS configs.
This is correct! Massive quality of life improvement
