Well... this is propably my third blog software or so and of course I already blogged about pihole multiple times not only because I use it for about a year now. But today I had another intention to blog about pihole that propably saved me, or at least the company I work at, a piece of hardware.

But from the beginning: I usually have some travel time to override. Due to I don't want to waste that time I started listening to podcasts to expand my horizons. So I found a podcast that I'm really into now. The podcast is software engineering daily which also belongs to a website, as the link tells you (Captain Obvious has entered the game). There's some ad's in the podcasts but I absolutely recommend it since it's free for the listener , I understand that the author doesn't want to do it for free and of course there's a lot of preparation, technical skills and working on the soundfiles before publishing a single episode. But back to business now.

I was listening to the PiHole podcast (spotify link) when I got the intention to create a blog post about that topic.

I won't explain how it works (instead I'm gonna link it here) but i will tell you what your benefits are when installing it in your network at home. You basically need a debian server, such as a Raspberry Pi. Buying a raspi just for installing pihole is absolutely worth it, by the way. So pihole filters the DNS requests of your whole network for ads and tracking websites that are linked on the websites you visit day by day. So you protect your smartphone, your computer and all the devices that make use of your internet connection. Additionaly you have beautiful statistics over what has been queried, how much of your webrequests have been blocked and so on. You don't need to install heavy weight plugins in your browser, which actually download the ads and just don't display it. So to say: The servers that host the ads aren't even contacted by your device because pihole knows whats behind the request and instantly blocks it for you at a really low cost of resource. That saves bandwidth and time to load websites.

There's many more reasons to install pihole, some people might want to know where their smart tv's or cheap chinese smartphones are calling home to. Maybe you want to know how many requests of your complete traffic are blocked (in my case its over 30%!) and of course you're able to restrict those home calling actions from your "intelligent" devices. For more check out the pihole blog or the subreddit of pihole for some user stories or in case you have any trouble, the pihole community gently helps you out there.

To finish the story: I called my pihole website because i was preparing a little for writing this post and i navigated to the "recent requests" page, which shows every request the divices in your network called. On the third page I gulped. I saw that my laptop which was in my backpack was happily calling for company domains over wifi. I hasty opened the zipper and felt warm air, like a soft summer wind breeze, coming out of it. My laptop somehow resumed from the state of rest i put it in before leaving work.

So: Pihole (propably, admittedly) saved the life of my laptop.

I know there's a heat protection system included to my laptop but I really love my pihole and at least it saved life time of the CPU which is significantly affected by the heat level.