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Comment by dchuk | Hacker News Reader

I have a pi 4 running in the closet that hosts pi hole, Plex, Medusa, transmission, and a few other media acquisition solutions. All running with a simple docker-compose script.

My test for these types of projects is incident rate of my wife complaining about it acting up. So far, I only get an occasional “how come this ad isn’t working on Instagram?” ( :) ) or “where is my show that was on last night” ( :( )

It’s pretty crazy how reliable these little machines are for what you can apply them to. My only issue right now is Medusa seems to stall after a few days and require a restart of the container, and I haven’t been bothered to write a cron job to restart the docket compose nightly or even better, diagnosing and fixing the real problem. So I instead just Remote Desktop in every few days and restart things.

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I've been running pi-hole for months. Haven't had a single issue since setting it up. I've never needed to restart it. I forget it even exists until my kid wants to disable it so he can watch ads to get some stuff in games faster, and I can do that from any device on the network.

I think I'm going to add what's needed to make it a print server too. Right now my oldest kids PC is the printer machine so we have to turn that on to print anything, which is a lot these days with 2 kids doing remote schooling.

That's one thing I'm glad I splurged on... I don't print very regularly, and with ink jets, the print heads invariably have dried up on me... for a while now, just been using HP color laser printers with wired networking (they have wireless, but it doesn't work well). Pretty much every device detects it on the network and sets up without issue.

Now if only google could put printing options back into Android.

What do advertising-required websites like business insider look like with pi hole? Do they still allow browsing? With ad block on opera for example I am forbidden from browsing with a "it looks like you're using an ad blocker" page.

I actually don't use the pi-hole on my device because I don't run ad supported apps and I use FireFox with uBlock Origin to browse. It's mostly to keep my 4yo for getting blasted with app ads, he doesn't browse. So it's great for that purpose but note that it doesn't work on YouTube ads, they do something that makes it impossible (without also blocking YouTube).

I know you can add exceptions through the admin page but it's a bit tedious. If I did use it on my own devices, I would never add exceptions. In fact, if a site like that comes up too much in my general browsing, and I find myself accidentally visiting it, I add them to a custom plugin I have that removes links to them from any page. For example, I never see links to facebook, instagram, twitter, linkedin, forbes, wsj. Anything popular with a pay, sign-up, or anti-adblocker wall. I've done it for years now and I don't miss any of the sites I've added.

With Firefox focus it shows the same, and I can't browse. With FF and ublock origin + privacy badger, and it works. Both on android

I was also surprised at their reliability. I had a Model 1 B+ running in a dusty closet with an uptime of almost three years before I finally shut it down.

Any tutorials you can point to on the docker compose scripts to setup these items in an easy way? Thanks!

I started with this, and then modified it over a few months to be what I needed: https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/docker-home-media-server-2...

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