97 lines
5.3 KiB
Markdown
97 lines
5.3 KiB
Markdown
# Setting up a pihole at home
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What you'll need to get started:
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* a raspberry pi
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* a USB power supply
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* an SD card you can erase
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* a keyboard
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* an HDMI cable
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## Your current situation
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Your current situation looks probably *very* similar to the image below.
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You have some sort of router/modem/switch/wirelessAP combination box sitting somewhere in your house.
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To this device you have your PC's, printer, phone's connected either with a cable or over WiFi.
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I advise you to take some notes on your network settings *before* starting to mess around.
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Your `nameserver` is probably the IP address of your router and the `DHCP` server for both your wired LAN and wireless WLAN is probably the same IP address.
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This means your *bbox* does a few different things:
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* it's a modem that gives you a public IP address (from your ISP)
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* it does NAT so that your LAN devices can access the internet
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* it has a builtin DHCP and DNS server
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* it creates a wireless access point so you can connect your phone
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* it has a builtin hardware switch so you can connect multiple PC's
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As you found out during our exercises, a Linux machine can do all of these things if you configure it properly.
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We'll try and replace two, or for the brave ones three, of those *features* with a raspberry pi.
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This will be done **step by step** but it's worth pointing out that a basic pihole installation is not invasive at all.
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You won't break the internet by just installing the pihole package on your raspberry pi.
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Throughout the full installation it is however possible you'll have some downtime.
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If there are people in your household depending on the internet to work it might be best to schedule your installation with them.
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## Hardware installation
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It's probably easiest, and recommended, to do the installation with the raspberry pi connected to your network over Ethernet.
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You can perform the installation over `ssh` or with a screen and keyboard connected, it's fully your choice.
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You don't need an extra LAN adaptor, just plugging in the raspberry pi into the switch suffices.
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Once plugged in your network layout will look similar to the image below.
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I recommend you start from a fresh Raspberry PI OS installation, either with or without desktop environment.
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The raspberry pi should receive an IP address from your *bbox* and you should be able to `ping` devices in your LAN and out on the internet.
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## Installing pihole
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I won't explain this as it's part of the exercise but there are a lot of tutorials around.
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First you should **only** use the DNS feature of the pihole.
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This is completely **non invasive** to your network, nor towards the other computers in your home network.
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Check the installation by logging into the web interface of your fresh pihole install!
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## Testing the DNS aspect of the pihole
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Your pihole is now a DNS server!
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You can try it out by changing the DNS settings of a PC that's connected to your network.
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Depending on your OS it will be done in a different way.
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On Linux you'll find the `nameserver` you're using in `/etc/resolv.conf`.
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If you did it right, you should see a client connected in the web interface of the pihole.
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Try to go to some websites you know have a lot of advertisements and see if the pihole blocks them properly.
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## Time to take over the DHCP role
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The pihole can also be in charge of the IP addresses on your LAN.
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This is the **invasive** part of the setup.
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First you should turn off the DHCP server that is currently running on you network.
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As mentioned before, this is *probably* your *bbox*.
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Log into it and figure our how to deactive it.
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Once this is done you can enable the DHCP server on the pihole.
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This is done via the web interface.
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Try disconnecting and reconnecting a PC from the network and see if it comes up in the leases list.
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If it does, bravo!
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## Undoing your installation
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If you want to revert back to your original network layout the main thing you have to do is turn the DHCP server in your *bbox* back on.
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Do keep in mind you can't have two DHCP servers on your network.
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You can either turn off the raspberry pi completely or just stop the pihole service via `systemctl`.
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Try to disconnect and reconnect one PC first to see if it get's back the normal settings from before.
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If it does you successfully removed the pihole from your network!
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## For the brave
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The raspberry pi has a builtin WiFi adapter you can use to create your own WLAN network.
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You can either have the clients join in the same range as your LAN network, or create a secondary subnet.
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If you opt for the latter you'll have to tweak you DHCP settings a bit.
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The package that turns your pi into a wireless access point is called [hostapd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostapd) and you can find heaps of [tutorials](https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wireless/access-point-routed.md) online.
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## For the super brave
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We'll set up a VPN in an upcoming class but the pihole is often used together with [pivpn](https://pivpn.io/).
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If you decide to try this out keep in mind that you'll have to add a port forward from your router to the pi and that this **will expose** the VPN service to the internet!
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There is nothing inherently *wrong* with that but you'll see hacking attempts almost immediately.
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**Use good passwords or preferably encryption keys.**
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