A little black hole for ads, and a big window into your own network
Ever wanted a magic switch that kills ads across every device on your home network — phone, laptop, smart TV, even your kid’s tablet — without installing a single browser extension?
That’s Pi-hole. And once you set it up, you’ll wonder why you waited this long.
But here’s the real reason I wanted to write this lab post: Pi-hole isn’t just an ad blocker. It’s secretly one of the best free networking classrooms you’ll ever run. If you’ve ever nodded along in a meeting when someone said “DNS,” “DHCP,” or “default gateway” without really knowing what’s happening under the hood — this lab will fix that, hands-on, in an evening.
What Is Pi-hole, Actually?
Pi-hole is a network-wide DNS sinkhole. In plain English: every device on your network asks Pi-hole “hey, where do I find this website?” before it goes anywhere. Pi-hole checks that request against blocklists of known ad and tracker domains. If it’s junk, Pi-hole simply refuses to answer — the ad never loads, because the device never even finds out where to send the request.
No browser plugins. No per-device setup. One box, blocking ads for your entire home.
Why It’s Worth Your Time (Three Real Reasons)
1. It blocks ads network-wide Set it up once, and it protects your smart TV, your gaming console, your partner’s phone — every device that normally has zero ad-blocking options.
2. It shows you what your network is actually doing This is the part people underestimate. Pi-hole’s dashboard shows you, in real time:
- How many DNS queries your home generates a day (the number will surprise you)
- Which devices are the chattiest
- Which domains are being queried most — including trackers you didn’t know existed
It’s essentially free visibility into your home’s web traffic, the kind of thing you’d normally need enterprise tooling for.
3. It teaches you networking by doing, not reading This is the one I care about most. Setting up Pi-hole forces you to actually touch:
- DNS — how name resolution works, and what it means to be the DNS server
- DHCP — how devices get IP addresses, and how to point them at Pi-hole
- Gateway — how traffic actually leaves your network, and where Pi-hole sits in that path
You can read about DNS for a year. Or you can break it once at home and understand it forever.
The Concepts, Explained Simply
Before we install anything, let’s make sure these three terms actually mean something to you:
DNS (Domain Name System) — Think of it as the phonebook of the internet. You type google.com, but computers only understand IP addresses like 142.250... DNS is the lookup service that translates one into the other. Every single website visit starts with a DNS query.
DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) — When your phone joins your Wi-Fi, it doesn’t know its own IP address yet. DHCP is the service (usually your router) that hands out an IP address, and — importantly for us — tells the device which DNS server to use. This is the lever we’ll pull to route traffic through Pi-hole.
Gateway — This is the “door” out of your home network to the internet. Every device knows its gateway’s IP address so it knows where to send traffic that isn’t meant for the local network. Pi-hole doesn’t replace your gateway — it sits quietly between your devices and the outside world, filtering DNS along the way.
Once you see these three working together, the rest of networking starts clicking into place.
Lab Setup: Installing Pi-hole (Step by Step)
What you’ll need:
- A Raspberry Pi, an old spare PC, or a small VM (2 vCPU / 1GB RAM is plenty — sound familiar? 😄)
- A Debian-based OS (Raspberry Pi OS or Ubuntu Server both work great)
- 15–20 minutes
Step 1 — Update your system
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
Step 2 — Make sure curl is installed
sudo apt install curl -y
Step 3 — Run the official Pi-hole installer
curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash
This is still the correct, current install command for Pi-hole in 2026 (Core v6.3 / Web v6.4 at time of writing) — no third-party scripts needed, straight from the source.
Step 4 — Walk through the setup wizard
The installer will ask you a few questions. Here’s what to pick:
- Network interface — choose the one connected to your home network (Ethernet if possible, more stable than Wi-Fi)
- Upstream DNS provider — pick any (Cloudflare or Google are common beginner choices)
- Web admin interface — say yes, you want the dashboard
- Query logging — enable it, since this is your own home lab and it’s the whole point of the exercise
Step 5 — Set a static IP for your Pi-hole box
This matters more than it sounds. If Pi-hole’s IP changes, every device that points to it for DNS will lose internet access. Set a DHCP reservation for it on your router (or a static IP on the box itself).
Step 6 — Note your admin password
At the end of the install, the script prints a generated admin password. Write it down — or set your own later in Settings → Web Interface → Change Password.
Step 7 — Point your network at Pi-hole
This is where DHCP comes full circle. Go into your router’s admin settings and change the DNS server it hands out via DHCP to your Pi-hole’s static IP. Every device that renews its lease will now ask Pi-hole for DNS — no per-device setup required.
(Want to test on a single device first before committing your whole network? Just manually set that one device’s DNS server to the Pi-hole IP.)
Step 8 — Watch it work
Open the Pi-hole dashboard at http://<pihole-ip>/admin and browse the web normally for a few minutes. Then go check the Query Log. You’ll see, in real time, every domain your devices are quietly talking to — and how many of them Pi-hole just blocked.
What to Try Next
Once it’s running, don’t just leave it alone — poke at it:
- Watch the Query Log live while you open a random news website. Count how many tracker domains fire before the page even finishes loading.
- Temporarily disable Pi-hole and compare page load behavior with it on vs off.
- Add a custom blocklist and watch your blocked-query percentage jump.
- Try breaking it on purpose — stop the DNS service and watch every device on your network lose the internet. Then fix it. This is the fastest way to actually understand what “being the DNS server” means.
A Reality Check: Why Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram Still Slip Through
Here’s something I’ll be upfront about, because you’ll hit this within your first week of running Pi-hole: no matter how many blocklists you add, ads inside the Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram apps mostly keep showing up.
This isn’t a sign you set something up wrong. It’s a structural limitation of DNS-based blocking, and it’s worth understanding why, because it teaches you something too:
- Ads and content share the same domain. YouTube serves both videos and ads from the same handful of Google CDN domains (like
googlevideo.com). Pi-hole can’t block the domain without also blocking the video itself — so it has to let the whole domain through. - These apps use their own encrypted DNS. Many Facebook/Instagram/Meta apps and modern Android/iOS builds increasingly use DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) baked directly into the app, which bypasses your router’s DNS settings entirely — including Pi-hole. The app just asks a Meta or Google DNS server directly, ignoring what DHCP handed it.
- Ads are delivered as part of the app’s own API traffic, not as separate third-party ad-network calls the way a lot of websites work. There’s no “ad domain” to sinkhole — the ad is part of the normal app data.
This is actually a great teaching moment for the lab: it shows the boundary of what network-level blocking can and can’t do, versus browser-based or OS-level ad blocking, which operates after the content arrives and can be more selective. Pi-hole is brilliant at killing ads on the open web, smart TVs, and most apps that phone out to third-party ad networks — it’s just not built to fight walled gardens like Meta or YouTube that control their entire delivery pipeline.
If those specific apps are a priority for you, that’s a different layer of the stack (browser extensions like uBlock Origin for browser-based YouTube, or revanced-style modified APKs for the apps themselves) — worth its own separate lab post, honestly.
Final Thought
Pi-hole is one of those rare tools that gives you something practical (fewer ads, more privacy) and something educational (real, hands-on DNS/DHCP/gateway understanding) for the cost of an old spare machine and an evening of your time.
If you’ve been meaning to get more comfortable with core networking concepts, this is genuinely one of the best beginner labs out there. Set it up, break it, fix it, and watch your own home network in a way you never could before.
Keep Learning!
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