Started talking about Pi-Hole (still trying to install this fucker by the way) today with a collegue.

He had it installed and showed me around a little.

CW: Alright give me an example then I'll show you wildcard blocking.
Me: google.com 😅
CW: *enters and saves it. then tries to load anything related to google.com*

*no google.com domains load, all give a blocked error*

Me: Works great!
CW: Yup.
...
...
...
...
Me: Uhm so you aren't like surprised that I went with google.com as example and that I'd genuinely would block it?!
CW: No, why would I be?
Me: Well, most people consider me paranoid/crazy the second they find out I don't want to use google/google's services.
CW: well that's fucking retarded. why would anyone redicule you for not using something you don't want to use. You'll have your reasons.
Me: So if I'd say i do it for privacy reasons, you wouldn't find that redicilous?
CW: No, why would I? Not using google (and for that matter facebook etc) for privacy reasons is very logical really.

FUCKING. THANK. YOU.

Code reviews in a nutshell...

A little while ago someone here posted something about a piece of software called Pi-Hole. To that person, i wanted to say THANK YOU!!! It is probably one of the best things i ever added to my network!

Pi-hole is the best thing to ever be added to my home network.

Look... I know I'm just a newbie. I started a year ago as a junior. Sure. No one wants to do code review, so I got chosen to do it. People don't like it when their code gets criticised. And you know what? I get it, I should probably be a bit nicer with my comments. I should not suggest I'll make a fork and split internal library into two streams if things continue this way. I should not ask questions that can be understood as me being passive-aggressive.

But holy fucking shit, you're a senior developer. Don't treat Java as a fucking scripting language. Don't have a method that has 600 lines of code, because you're repeating the code! You've already copy pasted this shit, and modified it slightly. Like, couldn't you have created some architecture around the code? How can a senior dev copy-paste code?

Oh and why the fuck did you create a new utility class for functionality I already provide? Look, I admit, yours is a lot better, ok? It has extra functionality. But why the fuck didn't you enhance my utility class? Why did you create a new one? Did you just not want to touch my code, or did you not see it right below your newly created class?

Am I the only one who fucking cares about maintainable code in this company? When I got hired, I was in tears by how frustrating a lot of the things were. No documentation anywhere, not even fucking comments. No processes in place. Want to do something? Source code is your documentation. Fuck you! I busted my ass of to force everyone to document every little bullshit, to re-factor their MRs that I reviewed, and I won't let even a senior fucking dev pollute the code base!

Fuuuuuck... Me...

You just came in today, being new in your position. I've been with the company for around 5 years, and you're the new guy. Look, I absolutely respect your skills. You're not a newbie coming out of uni, ok? You're a skilled sysadmin. But you asking me "what is your college?" and after me telling you I majored in linguistics, your answer "huh, that's why" and explaining why I'm wrong in my programming practices (which are taken from the Apache foundation) is utterly bullshit. Fuck off!

1) The fact that you have a BS in CS doesn't mean you know the best. I've worked as a programmer for some time. You were never paid to write a line of code.

2) Even if you were absolutely, positively, non-questionably right, you have no right to be condescending.

So, can you just shove your degree far up your ass? Because my friend, you're uppity as fuck just because you spent 4 years in college learning theory that you never applied in real world. I spent years learning my programming skills alone, after 9 to 5 work, during the evenings and fucking weekends. I don't need to prove myself to you, you fuckity fuck, I have proven myself to our employer over the last five fucking years.

Fuuuuuuuck!

Not sure if CoreOS folks are laughing or crying (CoreOS -> Red Hat -> IBM)

I have a pi-hole setup in my network for ad and tracker blocking and am dual-booting my pc.
I recently noticed just how much data windows really is trying to gather from my machine.
So I took the pi-hole graph and you can VERY clearly see the os switch. All this useless traffic coming from windows. (This is with all the privacy relevant options inside the settings already turned off!)

Although I do give some privacy related advice here and there on here, I'm planning on hiring a server dedicated to devRant regarding privacy/tiny simple tools.

I've got the folloing in mind:

- Host the privacy website
- Put a pi-hole server on it for everyone to use
- Own IP lookup API which would display it in a few data formats.

Any other ideas?

It's very satisfying to setup Pi-Hole on a vps, point your dns to it, adding the words Facebook and Google to the wildcard blacklist and seeing that literally any request containing either one of those words gets blocked.

On the other hand, it's funny to see that devRant (devrantron) performs around 1k+ requests to devRant every 15 minutes.

I recently set up Pihole but i think i've gone a bit too far...

YouTube: Wait 5 seconds to skip this ad.
Me: Ooo this ad looks interesting.
*Watches for 15 seconds*
Me: Nah I'll watch my video now.
*Presses "Skip Ad"*
YouTube: Oh you like ads? How bout I give you another one right away? And this time you can't skip it!
Me: WTF???

(For those wondering, I usually don't mind YouTube ads. I have Pi-hole running on my network to block other ads)

So after fucking around with trying to setup pi-hole to block avatars in devrant, so I could just use it instead of a no-root firewall and accidentally deleting the devrant app data, I discovered this little option, let's pretend it was never there 🙄

Pro tip:

Make sure you can RECOVER from your backups.

It's all well and good backing this and that up, but make sure that when the shit really hits the fan you can recover.

I've now 4 days into recovering a raspberry pi that ran:
Pi-hole
Snort
DHCP
VSFTP
Logwatch
Splunk forwarder
Grafana

And serveral other things... I've learnt my lesson

My raspberry Pi finally arrived ☺️! Now i just have to set it up... Any advice on what linux distro i should put on it? (i will use it as a NAS, torrent server and pi hole)

I recently started naming my devices in a certain scheme:
Laptop - Sagittarius (central black hole in the milky way)
Server - Sirius (brightest star visible from Earth)
Pi - Centauri (closed star system to us)
Any iot devices would be named like unnamed planets (i.e. Centauri A, Centauri B, ...)

Do some of you have cool/interesting naming schemes for your devices?

Async/await my ass!

Has the power to Block everything...
Blocks himself...

FUCK
FUCKING BULLSHIT!
WHY THE FUCK DID I UPDATE MY RASPBERRY PI! FUCK, I CANT SSH INTO IT ANYMORE! ITS BOOTED AND THE FUCKING PI HOLE PROGRAMM WORKS BUT I CANT ACCESS IT TO SEE IF EVERYTHING IS FUCKING FINDE (which it totally isn't) FFFFFFFF

I LOVE PI-HOLE

A BIG SHOUTOUT TO MY FRIEND @theKarlisK

He is the real MVP.

We both spent the weekend to setup OpenVPN + Pi-Hole on Oracle free tier.

He hand held me through the entire process, was super patient with my silly queries and in fact explained me everything so well that it got imprinted in my mind.

And ofc, he was super quick to debug and resolve issues and handed me all the commands for quick execution.

Super glad to have worked with him on this project.

Step 1: Acquire Rasbpery Pi
Step 2: Install Rasbian Lite
Step 3: Install PiHole
Step 4: Setup VPN
Step 5: Get a domain name for the VPN server
Step 6: Install OpenVPN on Phone
Step 7: Connect to Rasbperry PiHole Server

NO MORE ADS MOTHERFUCKERS

Should I setup pi hole?

pi-hole knows my addiction

Buy a nice, clicky mechanical keyboard. The sound of Cherry MX blue makes me want to write code just for the pleasure of hearing and feeling my keyboard 😂

For fuck sake I get that people like python but not everyone is going to use it!

Just want a few articles or tutorials on interpreters and would you fucking look at that, it's all just in fucking python using external libraries...

Then I purchased a couple Linux and Raspberry pi magazines just to have a gander at some of the code examples and what do you think every single piece of code is? C? C++? Vala? Nope, fucking python!

I will eventually finish learning what I can about python but there are other languages that exist that isnt fucking python, give us some C, C# or even bloody JavaScript... Please

Ok rant about python over, back to my hole

I dont need DuckDuckGo,
I dont need any VPN
I dont need all of this "Internet Privacy Service" BULLSHIT which my ISP wants me to use,
I DONT NEED ANY OF THIS FUCKING SHIT!
AND I DONT WANT IT EITHER!
I HAVE MY OWN PI HOLE!
AND THATS FUCKING ENOUGH FOR WHAT I NEED! STOP TELLING ME ABOUT ALL THIS "We are clearly not logging your shit" WHILE YOU DO!!
Because I have my own shit!

Thx

Finally made good use of my RPi and setup pi-hole on it. After a painful 4hour long dist-upgrade and picking the right filters it is working like a charm. Why didn't I make this work earlier.

I've also wrote a little script which queries the api and displays different info on the AMOLED screen that was lying around unused for some time.

In case you are interested (from left to right and bottom), the traffic in the last 10 minutes with the max value on a graph, the most active clients query and blocked ratio as lines relative to the top one, and an overview of the total queries/ blocked queries and total clients.

At least I've finally spent a weekend useful not just playing games and watching anime.

Anyone have one of the new MacBook Pros with Touchbar? I'm looking for some project ideas to work on.

I already am working on a project for the Pi-hole project (network wide ad-blocking) but I am looking for some other good ideas. I think Apple's view of the Touchbar fell short, but as developers I think it opens up a lot of possibilities to use it as a great information/monitoring tool.

I am also still learning Objective-C and Swift so I am a newbie.

As a person from low-paying country, how do I reconcile with the fact that for the same work, and the same 8 hours, I get 1/3 of what a person in Germany does? In my previous team (same company), one of my teammates was from Germany. The same team, the same work, but he happened to earn a lot more.

This bothers me a lot sometimes. I have seen people requesting to be transferred to another country, and being denied, presumably because of the salary difference. Then, the person leaves, and someone in Australia gets hired. So, rather than moving a veteran person of whom you know fits your company culture to a higher-paying country, you let him go and hire a newbie in an equally-expensive country? What the fuckity fuck?

And to my friends from high-paying countries, especially managers: you don't have to feel bad, but have some common decency. If you come to my country, do not say "oh gosh, everything here is so cheap," or "the dinner for the whole team costs less than buying my family of four a dinner back home." That's offensive as fuck. If that's the case, fucking give me a raise you cheap fuck!

This pisses me off soooo fucking much.
"We're sowwy but we'll have to ask you to turn off your pretty little adblocker! We can't keep making money off of you by showing you stuff you don't want to see if you don't turn off your adblocker! But it's okay, who doesn't use an adblocker? Just turn it off for our site pleeeease"

Quit it with the quasi-friendly bullshit. If it's okay, why don't you fuck off and let me block whatever I want to block? It's ridiculous how many hoops I have to jump through just so I don't have to see ads on the internet. Even pi-hole doesn't help with this anymore. Now I need an Ad Blocker Blocker Blocker just so I don't have to wade through heaps of obnoxious ads every time I visit a page. It's so goddamn stupid.

Get pi-hole...

Just set up a Pi-Hole on AWS EC2.

Samsung Smart TV becomes Samsung Dumb TV.

Welcome back dear readers, to the next installment of my Raspberry Pi / Pi Hole / MitM box adventure!

For those of you who are new to this story, I'm a long experience programmer who knows very little about his home network or networking in general and has constantly been going over his 250GB data plan because 'rona, and thus, wants answers to "where is the data going".

So, I got the Pi, codenamed Mini-Beowolf, positioned between the modem and router... worked some fuckin systemd.networkd magic (which was sort of easy... but was hard cause I'm new to it) and viola, this son of a bitch passes through the ethernet and doesn't even show up on the router. Fu-King Beastly, I love it.

Now to static IP all my devices so I fire up my trusty TP-Link admin portal. I should add here... I've visited this admin about a total of 10 minutes prior to this when I set this wifi router up and just let it do DHCP.

So I'm getting to know my admin portal... I've got most of my devices connected to reserved IPs... and I find this one fuckin device reporting as "localhost".

Now, I've got a MAMP install... but it hasn't been running. But still I thought for sure it was just MAMP run a bit amok.

But no... it was my fucking Samsung "Smart" TV. That piece of shit is, and apparently has been reporting its device name as, sure as shit, fucking "localhost"... PROBABLY FOR YEARS.

Now, IDK how that didn't cause me any major problems over the years, and I read quite a few forums about people who it did mess up their network. So I resolved to rename the Samsung TV device.

I found the spot in the network settings of the TV... I changed the name from the pick list of rooms in a house like "Living Room" and "Bed Room", then I tried entering my own device name. But no matter what I picked, or no matter how many times I restarted/reset that TV the network name is ALWAYS "localhost".

Even though somehow my network survived this long... I'm not standing for that shit.

My Samsung TV is now blocked COMPLETELY at the router level. (After I ran one last factory reset and update)

The kicker? That Pi I built has a Samsung SSD... so I'm blocking Samsung WITH FUCKING SAMSUNG.

Needless to say, these are likely among my last Samsung purchases.

Join me next time when I FINALLY try to turn Pi Hole on and then get a tcpdump (or some other lesser output from the tcp stream) going.

Thank you devRant for introducing me to Pi-Hole and F-Droid. My life being my family's "sysadmin" has become so much easier after those two discovery.

How to setup Pi-Hole for a person without a Pi and is a Windows user? Yes I'm dumb

For years I felt like an imposter for not rooting my smartphones, and not owning any raspbis. - Now finally I got an pi 4 and installed my so long desired pi-hole.

Quite disturbing that at least 30-40% of my traffic is known ad shit. Such an infestation.

ok, so first there were ads.
Then came adblock and the likes.
Then websites started implementing randomly generated strings.
Then came pi-hole.
Now some of the websites are using RNG + hosting ads on their domains...
(the order might not be very accurate, but you get my point)

So what now ?
I'm guessing that the next step for adblock will be to use AI to recognize these RNG strings, and then the websites will use AI to generate better strings (harder to distinguish if it is relevant content or an ad).
In other words - AI vs AI :D

what do you guys think ? :)

Finally got some time to setup Pi-hole

I'm too dumb for setting up Pi Hole 😭

And this is how it starts. I bought a Raspberry Pi 3 B+, quite some time ago. Plain board, just the board and a case. Why? Well, I have no idea. I always wanted one for some reason... and finally got one.

I got a good sd card for it, and flashed raspbian and... now what? What should I do with this?

*Looks up "Cool RPi projects"*

*Nah, I already have a NAS... No, wouldn't really use a media center... play games?*

*Well, let me just install sshd and come back to it later.*

Today, I run pi-hole, jekyll, node, gitd, a ton of other things that ends with d... I am even considering buying an extra one (maybe two).

Now I'm really afraid of what would happen if I give in to the urge of buying sensors and add-on boards.

Just setup a Raspberry Pi with Pi Hole. Damn, this is sweet!

Fuck this god damn router. Up to now I was really happy with the router/modem my ISP gave me (UPC Connect Box) but today I set up pi-hole on my raspberry and found out that I can't change my fucking routers DNS settings....

After falling down the Manjaro hole for months I yesterday decided to leave Manjaro for Pop!_OS. I lose a bit of performance and battery life, I gain a ton of UI polish, I gain a lot of package support, and I lose some hard earned nerd points.

My NAS has an easy to install Debian tool for file sync. I can use Etcher for making bootable USB/SD for my raspberry pi. Firefox is the default browser and I can use all my plugins and password manager out of the box. Apt is easier to use than pacman. Easier Python development setup. Docs are more often written for Debian. (For some reason I spent hours trying to get powerline and oh-my-zsh working right in manjaro’s xfce terminal before giving up.)

Is told to make a cool football themed board for a planning expo.

Thinks football is stupid, but makes an awesome board with a built in football game made with a Raspberry Pi and optical sensors to detect when you throw a ball through the hole.

Boss tells me that my board doesn’t match the theme and doesn’t even mention the fact that what I made was cool as fuck.

Have to trash the board and make something lame with construction paper footballs instead.

My soul is dead. Business people are such fucking children who punish creativity and reward mediocrity. I need to find a company run by developers.

Just got my new RPi 3+ and about to set up Pi-hole
Soo excited 😀😀
Farewell ads you will not be missed

Anyone know private/encrypted p2p network drive app (best would be opensource) between devices in the internet, with multiple user support, invite only ?

It should work behind nat so need use some 3rd party hole punching server for handshakes.

Let’s say I got a movie I want to share with my friend but instead of him downloading it, I would stream it directly from my device and my friend would open it using ex vlc.

Same with other files, on computer can be mounted as network drive.
Or small app with drag drop or cli to add / remove shared directories.

Can be raspberry pi device.

Thinking more, it should work like vpn network but with tunnels between computers.

Can it be done using ipfs ?

So, today, I wanted to try setting up a wireguard VPN server on my little raspberry pi at home. I... expected /some/ issues, but what I found dumbfounded me.

1 - I already had the wireguard package from the unstable branch of the main raspbian repo installed... Huh, okay.
2 - Setting up config was extremely easy... Wow, so the rumors were true. Wireguard really is almost dumb-simple.
3 - Failed to create a network interface? Oh, trouble, here it is! So lets see... modprobe wireguard... Nope. Don't have the module? What?
4 - Reconfigure package to rebuild the module - missing kernel headers? Huh... weird

This was the simple stuff... Then I went down the rabbit hole of the Raspberry Pi ecosystem:

1 - There is the Raspberry Pi Bootloader, that is apparently separate from the Kernel itself. And I didn't seem to have any of the standard linux-image-* installed... What? Weird, yet there I was, running a 4.19.42-v7+ kernel...
2 - No kernel and no headers... What... The... Fuck
3 - Okay, so... Lets just... try to install the latest kernel image then? One apt-get install... It downloaded the image, but during package configuration, it failed because... I didn't have... its headers? What? What for? And if it needs them (for whatever reason), why isn't the headers package as a dependency? Ugh, whatever...
4 - Another apt-get install and... Okay, building the initrd image aaaaand...
FAIL
WHAT. What is it this time!?

Oh... Ran... No more space on device? What? Is /boot independent? Of course it is, it has to be, its a bloody different filesystem

Okay, so, lets che-OH MY GOD WTF.

Its just bloody 45 MBs big! The entire /boot is just 45 MBs large. WHY. THE. FUCK.

This was a default raspbian install from I have no idea when. But... Why. Oh WHY would ANYONE pre-configure /boot to be this incredibly tiny!?

No wonder the new init ramdisk couldn't fit in there! Its already used up from 64%!

Thanks, Raspbian Devs, now I gotta reinstall the whole system because, yes, the /boot is, of course, sector 8192. Just far enough from 2048 that there are *some* sectors free - About 3 MBs.

So what did I try? Remove the partition and recreate it from the very beginning. Only... I never tried in in the past, and okay, kernel doesn't like having the partition where its image resides deleted on the fly, it will not give up FDs pointing there or something.

So now, I have a system I cannot reboot, or it will never boot back up :|

Thanks, Raspbian!

I need to get a cheap 1U somewhere or something T.T

Have you ever seen someone getting fired for an email? If so, what was in it?

Using MongoDB instead of carefully designing SQL tables and relations between them #wk126

This heat brings out the worst in me.
I seriously considered turning all my tech off, including my raspberry pi running pi hole.
Luckily I came back to my senses...
So I attached a little weather board to the raspberry pi to find out what temperatures I have inside.
27 C° in here ain´t that bad in comparison to outside...

So I'm interested in building a Raspberry Pi stack at home to continue securing and adding my smart home capabilities, 👍

Have ideas for 2/3 but what else could I look to add?

1. Pi. Hole with cloudflared argo proxy for all DNS
2. Home Automation server
3. IPS / IDS like Bro or snort? Or firewall like pfsense?
4. Log server with Splunk agent from other pi's and router....
5. What else?

Ideas in the comments

can someone explain to me why local pi-holes aren't a thing?

can't we just have an application that has a blacklist of domains that get blocked?

About a month ago my grandfather gave me the okay to work on a pi-hole and attach it to the router

So I did that yesterday, and he yells at me for it (because having a civil conversation is impossible with him) and says that we don't need "extra stuff" and says that I'll break the router.

I tried to explain how the process works but I was just shut down and interrupted.

He could have at least told me he changed his mind so I wouldn't have wasted over two hours of my day building and troubleshooting the device.

Mind you, he literally worked in hardware for 50 years and has had ham radio as a hobby for over sixty.

I've a rp0w only running pi-hole on it. What else would you recommend me to put on it? Give me some cool ideas!
ps: I already have a rp2 with a mediacenter and retropie.

So while we all ranting about Mozilla fucking up, has anyone ever used a pi-hole?
If anyone who doesn't know what a pi-hole is, it's basically a blackhole for ads which works across all your devices in the network

Can you share some of the really good interview experiences you had? What made you love a job interview, regardless whether you landed the gig?

wanted to set up a k3s cluster with my pi's. took me a fucking whole day to find useful ansible playbooks (which I needed to fix because outdated).
I want to habe metallb and nginx ingress running, so that differs from the default.
and now i spent the whole day trying to install a fucking pi hole and for some reason metallb does not fart out an external ip for the pi hole.

found several issues regarding this matter.

maaaan i am completely new to this whole clusterfuck and i feel a bit overwhelmed atm. i thought this would be easier. am i just an idiot?