Why doesn't ad blocking work?

I set up pi hole on my raspberry pi. These are the steps that I followed:

  1. Buy raspberry pi 4

  2. Upload pi OS with a micro sd card

  3. Plug it into my router and set up vpc

  4. Install pi hole and add all the default lists

  5. Set up pi hole with my router by putting in the ip address under DNS SERVER on DHCP Server in the LAN options. I also removed the DNS servers that I had for open dns on the WAN page.

  6. Set up open dns by going to settings and dns and selecting open dns and putting in the name servers in custom 1 ipv4 and custom 2 ipv4. I didn't have to change settings on open dns because my ip address remained the same.

This is what I did to confirm it's working:

  1. Went to Test your ad blocker (in a few simple steps) - Ads-blocker.com and confirmed there were no ads

  2. Went to network and saw my mac id for my computer listed under "uses pi hole" (for what it's worth, my router does not show up under "uses pi hole". also, I set up my router with eth0 and my pi is plugged in to my router.

Yet, I still see ads on duckduckgo.com and google.com and the websites that I'll upload.

How can I get pi hole to block advertisements?

Please post the token generated by

pihole -d

or do it through the Web interface:

Tools > Generate Debug Log

6 posts were split to a new topic: What do debug logs contain?

So according to this section, blocking is working, at least on the Pi itself.

*** [ DIAGNOSING ]: Name resolution (IPv4) using a random blocked domain and a known ad-serving domain
[✓] static-tagr.gd1.mookie1.com is 0.0.0.0 via localhost (127.0.0.1)
[✓] static-tagr.gd1.mookie1.com is 0.0.0.0 via Pi-hole ({removed})
[✓] doubleclick.com is 172.217.6.78 via a remote, public DNS server (8.8.8.8)

From a client machine, what is the result of the following command?

nslookup static-tagr.gd1.mookie1.com

Also, might help to see if your client can see the Pi-hole:

nslookup pi.hole

And I get this too ** server can't find pi.hole: NXDOMAIN

The Server address matches the local IP for your Pi-hole device in your debug log (you scrubbed the one in the setupVars section, but missed the one in the networking section - but no harm, I can't do anything with a local IP :slightly_smiling_face:) so Pi-hole should be working for your client device.

So, it is blocking the ads it knows about. Another thing to check is that your client device does not know about any other DNS servers (on windows, for example, you can do ipconfig /all to see details about what it is expecting)

If you have IPv6 enabled on your network (to the internet) then you may also find that it is resolving via IPv6 (this is an area I have next to zero experience in, so I can't really help there I'm afraid)

It is sometimes worth watching the pi-hole log as you browse the internet to see what is and isn't being blocked, you can do so with a pihole -t on the Pi-hole device. From there it's a case of either adding more adlists to your install, or manually blocking things you don't want to see... but that is down to personal preference on your part :slight_smile:

Thanks!

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