I'm trying to redirect YouTube ad servers. I have the following regex thanks to pk198105:
(^r[[:digit:]]+(\.|\-+)[[:alnum:]]+\-+[[:alnum:]]+\.)(googlevideo|gvt1)\.com$
The problem is that this blocks the ad domains and the YouTube client on my smart TV goes into a loop looking for working servers. However, someone else found that if you simply redirect these requests to googlevideo.com they are handled and the video plays.
So I need to redirect everything matching the regex to googlevideo.com.
You won't be able to do that with Pi-Hole without modifying your local code.
Pi-Hole either blocks or doesn't block a domain. There is no mechanism for redirect.
If you were to set up a proxy and have the proxy examine the domain, you could filter on this regex.
What about BLOCKINGMODE? That lets you select redirecting blocked domains to the Pi's local IP address and a page where you can whitelist. Is there some way I can change that to redirect everything to do googlevideo.com instead?
I don't think you can redirect, using regex, however, A solution for individual redirects can be achieved. This has been explained here, for safe search.
for your redirect, this would imply this hosts (/etc/hosts) entry:
172.217.17.36 googlevideo.com
or whatever googlevideo.com resolves to in your area
and a dnsmasq configuration file (/etc/dnsmasq.d/97-redirect.conf), containing the following:
cname=<the domain name you want to redirect>,googlevideo.com
you can enter as many redirections as you want to, just duplicate the cname entry and change <the domain name you want to redirect>
The down side of this approach is you will have to restart pihole-FTL every time you change the configuration file.
Don't know if this a solution for what you're trying to achieve...
Thanks jpgpi250. I was aware you can do it that way with IP or domain redirects, but the problem is that Google has a vast number of servers offering up Google video and there is no way to find them all, hence the regex.
Someone made a script that adds the advertising domains after the first time they are used, but obviously it's not as robust as the regex.
I'd be happy to have a PiHole just for YouTube where all blocked domains are redirected to googlevideo.com. Maybe there is some way to reconfigure what BLOCKINGMODE=IP does.
If you changed the IP that is returned for blocked domains, then all blocked queries would go to that IP. It is better to do as @jpgpi250 suggests.
That would be fine Mcat12. Is there some way I can do that?
I'll have a PiHole just for YouTube.
No, that is not a feature.
Okay, I'll open a feature request. If I have time I'll look at contributing code.
NOT sure this will work. When using blocking mode IP, the IP addresses (IPv4 and IPv6) are read from /etc/pihole/setupVars.conf. You could try changing the IP addresses in this file, EVERY bllocked domain would than be redirected to these IPs
NOT sure what happens if the weekly pihole -g OR pihole -up runs. Pretty sure pihole -r will undo the configuration change.
Hmmm... Well I'm sure we can fix the configuration overwrite. Isn't the IP addressed in setupVars.conf used for the web UI though? I'll give it a try anyway.
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