Is adding 3 MILLION domains to your Pi-Hole Block List a good thing?

everybody keeps asking me how i have over a million domains on my piehole block lists when i showed off my dashboard in some of my previous piehole videos many of you spotted that number and wanted to do the same and you asked how do you have over a million domains on your blacklist well it's easy i use the list of curated sites and i'll show you how so the first thing you'll need to do is like and subscribe this video oh no i'm i'm kidding really well not really but it really helps algorithm okay so really the real first thing you'll need to do is make sure you have pi hole up and running now you can see on this default install we don't have very many block lists relatively speaking we have about 80 000 and that's a good start but it doesn't block a large majority of the things that you'd like to block so here's how we add some more you might think to go in settings it is not in settings i do this every single time it's actually in group management and then under group management it's under add lists and you can see here we have one list added so this is the one list where we get the 80 81 000 block list that we have today on the default install now we want to add more lists here and where do we get them and we get them from this site called firebog now i stumbled on this a while ago on reddit and thought it was a pretty good list this site is full of blacklists maintained by different communities and it's updated regularly and i've had a lot of success with these and i'll share which ones with you i usually turn on so first of all if you look at this list it's broken up into categories so first of all we have the suspicious list now these are domains that are kind of suspicious are doing nefarious things or doing unknown things and so they're grouped in this category called suspicious then we have the advertising list and this is pretty obvious this is a list of advertisers most of the domains in these lists focus on serving up advertisements then we have the tracking and telemetry lists this is doing exactly what you think it's doing tracking and telemetry but these are primarily used for metrics and telemetry and and tracking people if you will then we have the malicious list now these lists are full of domains that have malicious activity malware spyware viruses and you name it and these are things you absolutely do not want coming through your firewall like most of these and then we have our other list which these are just a miscellaneous or a junk drawer list of items that didn't fall into the other categories but if you notice within these lists we actually have some icons so what do these icons mean well the green icon means that these are generally okay to turn on in your environment and you should be able to browse the web as if you didn't have them on at all except for it's doing the blocking for you so it won't interfere with your normal day-to-day browsing activities so these are generally safe to turn on the blue ones i found are okay too i've turned these on and i've noticed that it has very little impact on my day-to-day browsing i feel like these are generally safe to turn on too and then you have the ones with the x and the line through them and these are pretty much a no-go for me now these sites are not recommended because they have too many false positives they're not being maintained or they're deprecated or they're biased in some way or another now i'm not the one that says they're biased it says right here in their documentation but i trust that this author has done their research so their words not mine and so for me and to get to a million block lists we're going to add all of the ones in green and most of the ones in blue and then we should be pretty well protected so how do we do that so the way that we do that is that we copy this block lists and these block lists are just a list of rules of domains and we apply them to buy hole in the add list group management section so let's copy this one first one on a suspicious list we'll paste it into the address section and we'll add a comment so most of the time i just add a comment like firebonk so if i ever need to go through these again and say hey which ones came from firebog i can filter based on this comment and see them all so we'll add this one with the firebog comment and now that we've added them all we should have quite a few in our list but first a warning now i know that adding over a million block lists to your pie hole sounds like a good thing because why wouldn't you want to block things that are bad bad things are on a sliding scale some people may consider tracking within an application tracking or bad and so those things might be added to this block list but you might find that you're not able to use that app or that website anymore and so this all boils down to how you want to manage your pie hole now the sensible approach is to block things as needed but you end up spending more time looking at logs in your audit list and blocking things to get to a good state but if you take the opposite approach which is this way adding a million block lists you're going to spend a lot of time now debugging why sites won't work and adding them to your allow list so before toggling all of these on and enabling that just know that you might be doing a little bit of debugging if things don't work and so if you're more comfortable with blocking things as they come up this might not be a good solution for you it's good to try but it's easy enough to back out and turn these off but if you want to go all in with block lists go this route and then debug why sites won't work so anyways there's my disclaimer let's make sure that all of these are enabled and they are and then we'll go to tools and we'll say update gravity so this is going to update our block lists and this should happen on a regular basis so we're going to update all of our block lists so it's pulling all of those down and it's going to add them to our pi hole rule set and then you'll see a success message and you can see it added and extracted a lot of these domains analyze them and then merge them into our master set and then if we go to dashboard we have over three million now that's 3x what i told you you were going to get so hopefully you give this video a thumbs up and then hopefully that prompts you to subscribe too uh but back to what i was saying just because we have now 3 million block lists on our pie hole domain block list does not mean that we're going to spend less time debugging problems and if we go back into our ad lists there were a few that i probably wouldn't turn on not because i don't think they're not good just because i want to use some of those services and you might end up going through here and toggling some of these off one for instance was the facebook one if you use facebook or anyone in your home uses facebook you'll most likely have to turn that one off but if you don't use facebook or you don't want anyone using facebook that's a good one to keep on but in order to debug these or to troubleshoot these you'll end up spending a lot of your time in this audit log so as you're making queries it's going to show you ones that are allowed and then it's going to show you ones that are blocked for example in my own piehole server you can see ones that are allowed here and ones that are blocked and so you're going to spend a lot of your time here and since we have a lot of block lists here you're going to spend most of your time debugging the blocked queries you can see the ones on the right are ones that just came with lists and i haven't yet unblocked them but if i wanted to i would check the white list option or the allow list option and the same goes for loud queries if you didn't enable all of these block lists you would end up spending most of your time in the allow queries so which ones do you want to allow and if you wanted to allow one that was getting blocked you would just click the blacklist button or the allow button and then the other place you're going to spend a lot of time debugging these lists is in your tail of your piehole log and so as your home is making dns requests you'll see them populate here and in here you'll see whether they were allowed or whether they were blocked and so if you get to this point you find a domain you want to add to your allow list you would copy and paste that site and go into the whitelist section or the allow list section and you would add that domain you want to allow so let's say for instance talking about facebook if you wanted to allow facebook you would just add the domain here facebook.com and then add a comment whatever you like and then you would add that to your allow list and then once that's added now everybody in your home can now get back to facebook and the same goes for the blacklist or the blacklist section if some domain on that list wasn't covered although you have three and a half million you would add that domain here and then add a comment to it as well and so if you wanted to add facebook to the block list you would add it to your block list and now it works and now i have no idea what will happen because we have facebook on the allow and the block list but anyway and so that's how i have over a million domains on my pi hole server you can see here we have 3.4 million but i bet it would be pretty painful to do normal internet stuff normal internet stuff just your day-to-day browsing with 3.5 million turned on uh but give it a shot so let me know how many block lists do you have in your pie hole block lists do you have more than the million that i have are you gonna try it with 3.5 million if so let me know in the comments section below and remember if you found anything in this video helpful don't forget to like and subscribe thanks for watching dude thanks for the sub appreciate it i know i i say dude a lot so i apologize i lead brought it up but i i realized too when he called it i'm like man if he's saying i say it a lot then i i do and it's just something growing up it was always dude or man and it's sometimes you mix them up and you're like dude man dude really really dude man anyways

Channel: Techno Tim

Views: 43,748

Rating: 4.9619613 out of 5

Keywords: techno tim, homelab, home lab, pihole, pi hole, pi-hole, blocklists in pihole, block malware pihole, block ads pihole, how to add all block lists to pihole, firebog, the firebog, how to block sites with pihole, allow list, block list, block all ads pihole, add domains to your blocklist, security, pihole security

Id: 0wpn3rXTe0g

Length: 10min 17sec (617 seconds)

Published: Sat May 08 2021