I always wanted to have a device which is always on in my home network. I am not a homelabber though, I have no place nor interest to have noisy machines in a corner.
So I bought a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W to check how would it work. It is small as hell, and cheap. After assembling a case, I installed Pi-hole on it. Since I am potato on the topic, I followed a simple youtube guide (it is in German, but easy enough to just follow the steps).
To be fair, I was using uBlock Origin on all my devices already and I am infinitely happy with it. But I wanted to see how much it would block on the DNS level.
After flashing the SD card, I plugged it in, and powered it up by connecting it to my router via USB. So no need for an extra power adapter, neat. Then I waited few minutes (it takes time to boot), and connected to it via SSH.
While configuring it, I had a tricky twist: My router did not allow me to set custom DNS servers (thanks Vodafone!). So, I went to the interface and assigned a static IP to the Pi, and disabled DHCP completely on the router:
Instead, enabled DHCP on the Pi-hole:
This means all clients of my network would get their IPs assigned by Pi, thus getting Pi-hole as their DNS server, which is OK. This also means if Pi-hole goes down, I can only connect to my network via static IP. A fair trade-off for me.
I also added few blocklists to it, mostly the ones I found from Github (which are still maintained). Then I used it for a day before checking the stats.
God damn. 
I did not know the situation was that bad. It is constantly showing ~30% blocked requests. So 1 of every 3 DNS requests we make from our house was for REQUESTING ADS! 
Ad industry really needs to die. So here is my advice: Prioritize your privacy, prioritize ad-blockers. If your browser wants to prevent you, change it. If your operating system collects data about you for whatever reason, change it.
Peace out!
Also, since pi-hole is working idle (even though it is not a powerful device), I also installed Syncthing on it. Works like a charm.
