Having got my Raspberry Pi for Christmas, I was finally able to enter the world of home labs and I’m slowly getting everything up and running.
That said, one thing I was super excited about but hasn’t come to fruition was Pi-Hole. That’s for two reasons, one my Pi isn’t hardwired into the router and two my router kinda sucks (Virgin Media Hub 5).
So I came here to ask for recommendations for a router. One that would allow me to run vLANs and use my Pi for adblocking. Honestly the advice I got was like fire and I was like water.
I wanted a simple cheap solution and everyone was like just spend 🥺
Eventually though, my ignorance waned and I started looking into what the suggestions were, which was essentially buy an N100 Firewall Mini PC with 4 Ethernet Port, load up PFSense or OpenWRT, then buy an Access Point, connect it and profit.
So with my dreams of a £50 plug and play experience down the drain, can someone explain to me how it all works? Why is this the suggestion? My Pi is kinda set and leave. My NAS is set and leave, will a firewall PC be the same? Also why a firewall PC over a second Pi?
The biggest issue you’re going to have is that the Virgin hubs don’t allow you to change the DNS server that they hand out via DHCP.
By default, Virgin hubs are in ‘Router mode’, this means that they use DHCP to hand out IP addresses, a default gateway address (the hubs own IP address), and DNS server addresses. Typically the DNS server will be the Hub itself and any request sent to the hub will then be forwarded on to the DNS servers that the hub had defined for forward lookup.
Virgin have decided that they know best and don’t allow you to change the DNS servers that they forward your requests to, so you can’t modify the router to point to your PiHole.
There are a couple of options here (and forgive me, I’m doing this from memory as I no longer use virgin):
Disable DHCP (IP addresses management) on the Virgin hub and enable it on the PiHole, if possible. You can then configure the PiHole to hand out the IP addresses for the network, including the PiHole address as the DNS servers (and the Virgin hub as the gateway).
Put the Virgin Hub into ‘modem mode’. This requires you to buy an additional router that will allow you to change the DNS servers to point to your PiHole. Putting the Virgin hub in modem mode basically disables all Router functionality and tells it to only terminate the network connection of the virgin connection, you then connect you new router to the hub (and only your new router) to perform all of the functions required to handle your network. You’ll also need to disable WiFi on the Virgin hub (but I think it may do that automatically in modem mode).
In my opinion, if you can use the method in point 1, that’ll be your easiest and cheapest option, if not, you’re going to have to get a new router.
When I had Virgin (many, many years ago) I went down route 2, but mainly because I wanted more control over my network than Virgin would allow me than with their shitty virgin hubs.
You don’t know how much I’ve treasured this post and I couldn’t reply as I had it sitting in my inbox so I could find it easily. But thank you so much. I’m trying to go route two so I can run my IOT stuff on a VLAN.
I’m glad it helped! As i said, it was all from memory and was a good few years ago, so hopefully it all still applies!