Welcome to the second Raspberry Pi tutorial! In today's tutorial, we'll go over how to set up PiHole on your home network using a Raspberry Pi Zero and an ethernet OTG Cable. The video uses the original RPi zero, meaning no wifi. So if you are using a Zero W, you can skip a good chunk of the video and go straight to installing PiHole if you've already set up a headless Pi. Need help setting up a headless Pi? Check out the first tutorial where I show you How to Set up a Headless Raspberry Pi. 

Why did I choose to do Ethernet? Well, Ethernet is simply faster than wireless. I have a second PiHole that on a Pi Zero W, only connected through WiFi. The latency difference between the two, even on my internal network, is huge. The one on WiFi responds with a latency between 10-20ms and can vary even more depending on the signal (even though the Pi is literally right next to the router), whereas the Ethernet Pi responds with <1ms every single time. Speed is verything and that's why, having PiHole serve as your DNS over Ethernet is better. 

PiHole documentation can be found at Pi-Hole.net. I cover the basics of setting up PiHole and seeing the actual difference in time it takes to load a page. After you are set with Raspbian and have access to your Pi via SSH, run the following command:

    curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

The prompts that follow are covered in the video below. You can select a default DNS server or you can set a manual one like Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 (and 1.0.0.1) during or after setup. 

The video also shows you how to change your computer's DNS settings (on Windows 10) to go through your newly set up PiHole. The one thing I don't cover is how to change your router/modem's default DNS settings to go through PiHole because there are too many varieties of these products to make a generic tutorial. I would also recommend that along with chnage your router's DNS settings, you specifically send your computer through PiHole because then the PiHole will log all requests from your computer as your computer's IP address, instead of your gateway. This will make future troubleshooting easier. 

Questions about the topic? Ask below! I'm happy to help. 

Contest Info:

Thank you all for the interest you've shown in the Raspberry Pi Tutorial Series and thank you for being part of the first Giveaway! In total, I received 292 entries from the three methods of entry. It was a lot more than I expected. And to show my appreciation (since it is Thanksgiving weekend), I decided to increase the number of winners from 2 to 3. That's right, instead of two winners, I'll be picking three! Each entry has about a 1% chance of winning. 

To find out if you've won, please see the video below. I'll also update this page with the three winners shortly. If you are a winner, I will contact you in a day or two asking you for your name and address. I will accept PO boxes. If you won and you live outside of the United States, we will discuss shipping :) Winners were picked using the Winner Picker script. 

The winners are:

• David Mishchenko
• bugsman03
• shriek

If you did not win, don't worry! I am coming back in two weeks with a new giveaway and I plan on giving away at least three more Raspberry Pi Zero Ws! Maybe even more...

Thank you all again! Hope you are having a Happy Thanksgiving Weekend!

Remember to checkout the Resources section below for associated downloadable content, JSFiddle links, and other resources. Watch the video and follow along!