I resurrected a couple C.H.I.Ps a while back and they have just been gathering dust since.  I decided to try out the latest Pi-hole because it has been years since I played with it.  I was digging through my single board computer bag and found a C.H.I.P. and decided it should work as well as anything.  I kept digging through my old parts and added some pieces:

  • an ancient TRENDnet USB to ethernet adapter that only supports 10Base-T and USB-1
  • the shortest ethernet cable I own
  • an old phone charger
  • the shortest USB mini cable I own

Most of these things were just taking up space and they were definitely at the end of their usefulness, but they ended up being just what I needed.

The completed hardware!

With the pieces assembled, I fired up the C.H.I.P. (named chip_is_dead) and logged in to install the Pi-hole.  But, good ol' Debian Jessie had some issues updating in the modern world so I had to tweak a couple things:

sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https

Then, I had to update the apt sources.list:

deb http://cdn-fastly.deb.debian.org/debian/ jessie main
deb-src http://cdn-fastly.deb.debian.org/debian/ jessie main

deb http://security.debian.org/ jessie/updates main
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ jessie/updates main

deb http://archive.debian.org/debian jessie-backports main
deb-src http://archive.debian.org/debian jessie-backports main

deb http://chip.jfpossibilities.com/chip/debian/repo jessie main
/etc/apt/sources.list

After a quick update/upgrade, I was finally able to run the lazy/insecure pipe-to-bash installation:

curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

And off it went:

The install is very well automated and only asks a few questions to be sure you get the setup you want.  I opted for using all their blacklist providers and also installed the included web dashboard and management site.  

Pi-hole dashboard

I plugged the finished product into one of the LAN ports on my ISP provided router, and set up a static IP.  Then, I added chip_is_dead as the DNS resolver on my actual, useful, functional router.  Now the whole family is enjoying less ads and they are completely unaware of it.