Pi

[Dave Rice]

The RPi will start from power on – there is no power button – and pi hole starts itself.

[Ed P]

The biggest weakness of a Pi is the short life of the SD card, which can be dramatically shortened if the Pi is powered off without letting Linux go through its shut-down routines. If you are using a Pi on a 24/7 job such as PiHole then I strongly recommend that you consider dumping the vulnerable SD card and use a more robust storage device. This link gives a how-to. I use a metal cased usb stick and use superglue to add a cooling block as the stick gets surprisingly hot even when the Pi is apparently doing nothing .

If you cannot find a stick that works this link gives a slightly less robust alternate. (The SD card still does the Phase1 boot routine).

[Dave Rice]

Well said Ed, I should have mentioned that.

Steve if you aren’t using SSH yet you probably should be, get Putty https://www.putty.org/ installed on a PC. Basically you put the Pi IP address in, answer a one time security question, then you get a command prompt presented to you. This will allow you to do all sorts of things, including shutting it down gracefully.

sudo shutdown now : pretty self explanatory

sudo shutdown -r now : -r means reboot

This is also how I update my RPI running the UniFi WiFi controller as it has no GUI, TBH it’s easier anyway.

sudo apt-get update : gets a new list of apps from the repositories

sudo apt-get upgrade : upgrade any apps that need it.

You can also get the latest RPi firmware by using

sudo apt-get install rpi-update && echo Y | sudo rpi-update

 

[The Duke]

Thanks for the feed back guys. I’ve been using a pi on and off since gen one, so no the basics. I was just wondering if pi hole auto-launched on power up.

Still not moved (been away) and tbh it will probably stay where it is.

Also tonight I found out bt sports won’t load when going through the pi hole. I quickly white listed both bt.com and sports.bt.com, not sure witch fixed it, as I put them both in at once. The build up had already started, so it was a quick test, if that failed I was going to change my dns back to 8.8.8.8 I’m my router till the game finished.

Everyone has commented in the house at how much faster the net is. Spoilt kids, they have 80meg down (more like just 76) to share, and they complain about speeds lol.

Joking aside, its quite criminal how much time, band with and CPU power all the adds must steal from you. I do feel a bit dirty having the pi hole set up, but yea, sod it, the www mist be over twice as quick to load. And no more starting to read an article, them once the adds load it rubber bands you back to the top .

Does anyone know if the adds that are requested and sent, are actually counted on the advertisers end? Ie does it look like to them that they have server the add? So is some one charged, or rather lost one of their paid for adds.

[Dave Rice]

No they aren’t downloaded, the ad server isn’t even contacted. The Pi Hole sends back the internal stack IP (127.0.0.1) as the IP address of the ad server so your browser tries (and fails) to load the advert from your own device.

The opposite is true of browser ad blockers. They download the ad but just stop it displaying.

[Ed P]

If it doesn’t it is fairly easy to get a program to auto-launch on the Pi link.

Some programs can be picky to auto-launch as they want other things like Ethernet up and running first. You can normally bodge these by launching a script with the requisite delays etc which then goes on to launch your desired program.

[Anonymous]

The one problem I do have with my PiHole is that the admin page doesn’t update with statistics. An annoyance, rather than a problem. Youtube ads weren’t being autoblocked, but I found a list of domains to add manually which seems to have sorted that out 🙂

[The Duke]

Im glade the you tube adds are whitelisted by default, I don’t find them intrusive, and I know the YouTubers are struggling enough with googles constant change of policies on what’s ad-friendly content etc.

If you use you tube, you should really leave the adds in place, that’s literally the youtube content creators mortgage payments.

[Anonymous]

If they were quick little ads I could deal with them .But the other day I was in the shower listening to an hour long album . I thought the music was different at one point, having not listened to the album before I thought maybe it was a differntd track, but when I got out, it was actually an advert that had another 3 minutes to run if I hadn’t pressed the skip button!

 

And Grammally? Who is paying for that when you have spell check in almost everything these days!

 

I’m much more enjoying my YouTube without ads.

[The Duke]

We would all much prefer stuff if we weren’t paying. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. If everyone took that view, no ‘free’ content would be made.

I can understand why kids do it, but once one is earning, I just don’t see how anyone can justify it. Especially on the likes of youtube, where the creators earn very little (for the most part). If you have favourite YouTubers you should watch the full adds (not the feature-length ones) as the more of the add you watch the more you tuber gets in add rev from it.

Grammarly is free on mobile. And the pro account is free for most kids, as they get a school login.

I was amazed all my kids knew what it was, it turned out they all have used it. Even my 9yo in the jr has it. And my mow 23 years old used it back in high school.

I only forums it about 6 months ago.

[D-Dan]

Ed P wrote:

If it doesn’t it is fairly easy to get a program to auto-launch on the Pi link. Some programs can be picky to auto-launch as they want other things like Ethernet up and running first. You can normally bodge these by launching a script with the requisite delays etc which then goes on to launch your desired program.

You don’t need to bodge anything. Most things start with a systemd.service file, to which you can add dependency order. That way, if, for example, you need the network online, you would add:

After = network-online.target

to the service file.

Arch Linux, on a Ryzen 7 1800X, 32 GB, 5 (yes -5) HDs inc 5 SSDs, 4 RPi 3Bs + 1 RPi 4B - one as an NFS server with two more drives, PiHole (shut yours), Plex server, cloud server, and other random Pi stuff. Nice CoolerMaster case, 2 x NV GTX 1070 8GB, and a whopping 32" AOC 1440P monitor.

[Ed P]

Dan, I have not looked on the latest release but Raspbian started following the nasty deprecation of systemd that Debian started. From this link it looks as though it still causes problems. As a result I have bodging scripts carrying out the functions that were previously possible with systemd. However if you have found systemd does as used to be expected in the latest raspbian then I’ll be pleased to hear about it.

[Ed P]

I should have said systemv deprecation not systemd in my previous post. The latest Raspbian is Stretch so contains most of the Debian Stretch kernel plus specialist additions. As such it uses systemd, but I’d still like to know if it works as expected. If so then maybe I’d better start using it rather than avoiding it as being flakey.

[Anonymous]

The Duke wrote:

Grammarly is free on mobile.

Which means everything you type goes to their servers, not something I want.

[Dave Rice]

It’s not just Grammarly, it’s anyone else it chooses to share that with.

By uploading or entering any User Content, you give Grammarly (and those it works with) a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty-free and fully-paid, transferable and sublicensable, perpetual, and irrevocable license to copy, store and use your User Content in connection with the provision of the Software and the Services and to improve the algorithms underlying the Software and the Services.

[D-Dan]

@Ed

SystemD is quite mature, now, and used by pretty much every distribution (yes, I took my time switching with the same concerns that you have), but controlling everything through the unit files is so much easier than hacking your way through, and it does, indeed, work as advertised, now.

Arch Linux, on a Ryzen 7 1800X, 32 GB, 5 (yes -5) HDs inc 5 SSDs, 4 RPi 3Bs + 1 RPi 4B - one as an NFS server with two more drives, PiHole (shut yours), Plex server, cloud server, and other random Pi stuff. Nice CoolerMaster case, 2 x NV GTX 1070 8GB, and a whopping 32" AOC 1440P monitor.

[RSB]

Dave Rice wrote:

It’s not just Grammarly, it’s anyone else it chooses to share that with. By uploading or entering any User Content, you give Grammarly (and those it works with) a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty-free and fully-paid, transferable and sublicensable, perpetual, and irrevocable license to copy, store and use your User Content in connection with the provision of the Software and the Services and to improve the algorithms underlying the Software and the Services.

Do not worry to much, there to busy trying to fathom what @sgb101 is typing ??

Americans: Over Sexed, Over Payed and Over here, Wat Wat!

[Dave Rice]

In another thread I was looking for the Milestone CCTV site. Google it and clicked the link to get your free software. Computer says NO.

This site can’t be reached
http://www.googleadservices.com refused to connect.

Feck you Google! so typed milestonesys.com in the address bar and away we go.

[The Duke]

The pi hole blocks that iirc Dave.

Any Google return that is Sponsored the pi hole swallows up.

[Dave Rice]

Yes I realised that was the case, but I just thought it was cheeky of Google to totally refuse the connection because you couldn’t see the ads they want to peddle.

I will demand back all the money I’ve paid Google over the years ? but nothing could persuade me to knowingly use Bing.

[Author]

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