2nd of May

Marks Rpi Cluster continues running 24/7. After purchasing a couple more 32GB micro SD cards last week the cluster now consists of:

4 x Pi3 compute nodes

8 x Pi4 8GB compute nodes

3 x Pi4 2GB support nodes

Pi-Hole

I installed Pi-Hole on a Pi4. Its a caching DNS server that can use blocklists to prevent access to websites. It comes with a list of 80,000 advertising websites that it can block and has a webpage to show statistics. I also use a caching proxy server (squid) to speed up access by caching frequently used web traffic. I had a small list of about 30 advertising websites that I block with it.

Having installed Pi-Hole I pointed my proxy server at it as a DNS server and commented out blocking of advertising websites in the proxy server. The two worked fine together. Pi-Hole has a much more complete list of advertising sites than I ever had.

The next step was to install Pi-Hole on the same Pi as the proxy server, that way they don't need to communicate across the network. I installed it on the proxy server Pi4 and adjusted the proxy server to use it instead. Its doing its job of suppressing the adverts on most websites. It doesn't get all of them but its certainly getting most of them and internet access seems seem slightly faster (due to not downloading ads).

You can get Pi-Hole from https://pi-hole.net/ 

They have versions for Raspberry Pi OS, Ubuntu (ARM and x64), Debian (ARM, x64 and i386), Fedora (ARM and x64) and CentOS (x64 only).