Using Pi-hole on an Odroid C1+ - My experience so far

After dropping Odroid C1+ support in Archphile, this board became available for some new experiments.

For more than a year, I used privoxy on a Netgear R7000 router with DD-WRT as my main ad-blocker, but I wanted something easier and more configurable for a daily driver.

This is why I decided to install pi-hole pi-hole on the Odroid C1+.

Pi-hole was initially created for Raspbian/Raspberry Pi, but it can run on any Debian/Ubuntu/Centos box. So I downloaded Armbian Ubuntu xenial , wrote it on an sd card and booted it.

Using the following command:

armbian-config

I was able to configure the basic Armbian stuff (static IP, hostname, timezone etc..)

Then I fully updated the system (you can do it via armbian-config too - I prefer the “classic” way):

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

and continued to the installation of pi-hole:

wget -O basic-install.sh https://install.pi-hole.net
bash basic-install.sh

After Pihole installation, I downloaded and modified my adlists.list file, enabling most of the extra sources:

wget https://github.com/ahtrahddis/pihole_stuff/blob/master/adlists.list -O /etc/pihole/adlists.list
pihole -g

and a package cache cleanup:

apt-get clean

Finally I tweaked some Odroid related stuff:

wget https://github.com/ahtrahddis/pihole_stuff/blob/master/rc.local-odroid-c1 -O /etc/rc.local

wget https://github.com/ahtrahddis/pihole_stuff/blob/master/log2ram -O /etc/default/log2ram

Once a week, I check for updates in ad lists with:

pihole -g	

When I get notifications on the web interface that a new version is available, I update with the following command:

pihole -up

Summary and Notes

Pi-hole is an amazing piece of software. It’s highly configurable, extremely easy to install and it does the job right, as it blocks the majority of ads that can be blocked via DNS.

If you have an available Raspberry Pi or any other board that can get Debian/Ubuntu on it and you care about privacy/ad-blocking, Pi-hole is a must.