Good morning i am a day new to the pi-hole, so far its amazing. question i have is in the admin screen it shows that i am blocking 95,705 domains. is this the correct amount, how do i know if i have the latest updated list? i went to "tool's" update list. is that it, are there other list that have more blocked?
please advise.
Thanks!
We, the developers, use this set of lists and are perfectly fine with them. Your number is fine. There are users out in the wild that use a Pi-hole with heavily extended lists blocking over 1 million domains. However, I have to say, that I never came across an ad in several months using the stock lists.
It may depend on your usage style, though. If you do some heavy browsing in questionable areas of the web, it might be that you need extra lists, but this is something I have no experience with.
Great thanks for your feed back and quick response. is it safe to just let all the settings alone once the initial install is complete, is there any need to change anything. will it keep up to date on its own or must i do something to it weekly? I appreciate all the work you and your team put into Pi-Hole!.
Thanks
The initial setup should be fine for most users. The lists are updated once a week on Sunday at 01:59AM (your Pi has to be switched on at that time).
If you find you need to add extra lists, /u/wally3k over on reddit has put togther a list of lists here:
Use with caution, however!
Thanks for all the feed back, yes the pi is running 24/7!
Perfect, then you don't have to do anything further.
I'm considering this for my Ubuntu 16.04 VPS running OpenVPN-2.4. I've looked over some postings here and it seems they all refer to domain names. Can lists of malware IP lists be used as well, e.g.,
http://malc0de.com/bl/IP_Blacklist.txt
https://lists.blocklist.de/lists/strongips.txt
https://www.openbl.org/lists/base_30days.txt.gz
These might have somewhat different formats and compressions, etc.
Thanks for the software.
Lester
Hey Lester,
No - IPs cannot be blocked. Pi-hole works on the DNS level of things. However, computers will not ask the Pi-hole if they already know the IP and connect directly. So no possibility for us to interrupt these connections.
Are malware lists included in Pi-hole in any way?
Default Pi-hole Blocklists does include some malware lists, but you are free to add to them with any other Hosts formatted lists. We do require domain names and not IP addresses as we are a DNS based blocking solution.
Is there a way to block an IP list addresses that would be resolved by an unknown Domain?
I understand that it works at the DNS level and wold not block direct access, just curious if anyone has tried to block based on IPs that are resolved by a DNS lookup?
I'm not sure I understand your question. Pi-hole resolves domains into IP addresses, so you can't block a specific IP.
Basically if DNS tries to resolved to an IP on the watch list then to to return a different IP/pi-hole it. 
I understand if pi-hole uses parts of other open source projects that can't currently do it. Just wanted to put the concept out there, as it would increase the number of malicious lists we can block. Obviously it would not be imported the same as a host list, it would have to be referred to at the point of resolving an address.
As it appears that a the moment pi-hole can't do this. I might look into Open-WRT or another open router firmware to implement it as a firewall rule instead, to reinforce the pi-hole using the same hosts list as well to prevent bypassing.
OK, I understand now.
I believe you are correct. We use dnsmasq and lighttpd right now.
I was just thinking about the same, if we could add Ip based blocks we could use some of the lists from here to not only block ads but to add security. http://iplists.firehol.org/