Managing Pi-Hole

  1. Although Pi-Hole is installed and configured, it isn't actually much use until you point your devices to it. To do this, you need to make sure that the DNS settings of anything you want to be protected from ads are changed. The simplest way to do that is to go into your router and set the global DNS setting to point to your Pi-hole server. As I have no idea what router your using, I am not going to explain this in detail. But it should be easy enough to figure out.

  2. To update the ad lists head over to the Web interface to manage the system. The interface can be found at /admin of the IP you chose earlier. For example, it might be http://10.110.10.8/admin/ Once loaded, click "Login" and enter your password.

  3. You can manage the ad blacklists by going to Group Management and Adlists. You'll find that the two default lists are shown. Of course, you can add more lists; there is a great article that explains all you need to know about add lists. https://avoidthehack.com/best-pihole-blocklists

4. Checking that Pi-Hole is blocking ads is easy to do and only takes a minute. Firstly you'll want to choose a web page that usually has lots of ads and then visit that page with your regular DNS (not Pi-Hole DNS). You should see loads of ads.

5. Now set your system to use Pi-hole as its DNS provider and check again. All going well; you should see a whole with nothing in it where the ad used to be.

6. I should point out; the ad providers are constantly figuring out how to get around ad blockers. So you may need to tweak your blocklists from time to time. Please do your own research on this topic. There is a lot of information out there to help.

7. Now I want to show you the main reason I am using Pi-hole. Which is the Local DNS server. to set up the Local DNS, open up the Pi-hole web UI and browse to "Local DNS."

8. You will see that there are two sections here, "DNS records" and CNAME records. They both are very useful, but we will only focus on "DNS records" here. The CNAME allows you to create an alias for an already created DNS record. This enables you to set up names that are meaningful to you but may in fact, use the same settings. I don't use this feature. But I can imagine scenarios where it's valuable

9. So what I like to do is create DNS entries for all of my Proxmox servers and anything else that is internal to my network that has a secured webpage and gets a certificate error; for example, my router configuration page. But let's start with Proxmox. Your free to add whatever you need.

10. On the DNS Records page, enter the domain name into the Domain field. For example, in my case prox1.fitzsimmons.com.au and in the IP address field, enter the server's IP address, then press add.

11. Repeat this for all the servers you want to set up; in my case; I have prox1, prox2 and prox3, as well as my pi-hole server

12. Thats it your all set. now when you browse to the URL of your Proxmox server you wont get a cirtificate error.