YSK: you can setup pihole on any old rooted android (5.0+) device
I just discovered this and it works fantastically on any old / unused android device you might have lying around, I was shocked at how easy it was, all the instructions are there, once you have it running all you need to do is set your router DNS settings to your pihole IP address and presto! Ads and trackers are gone!
Most mobile devices won't work without batteries. The best way to work around this is to supply it with 4.2V (anything between 3V and 4.2V will do) over the battery connector.
Is there any modern day android phones that work without the battery. I feel like they'd probably run POST checks to make sure there's a battery inside. Maybe fairphoness?
The FP3 requires a battery at least. Ironically the device will actually still turn on and be usable if you removed ALL the modules besides the display module 😅 and of course the mandatory battery
Running a pi-hole doesn't require much juice. It's a fancy DNS server, not a router. First gen raspberry pis were pretty weak and even those things didn't even break a sweat.
Oh for sure. I think this is for a very niche user base: People who know about PiHole but don't have a pi/linux box but do have an old Android phone. It's definitely a strange but cool project.
I haven't seen any notable issues yet, a lot of people use a wireless pi zero to do the same thing so as long as you aren't running a state of the art gaming rig (which i'm not) I think it'll be fine
Your client hardware wouldn't matter tho. State of the art or whatnot of a gaming rig would be fairly low. In sure most modern mobile phones create more DNS requests these days compared to a Windows machine and steam. It's the configured software on the hosts that will dictate how much traffic your devices will get. A lot also cache by listening to the TTL. There will be some form of additional latency but your average Joe won't probably notice.
On should have a look on the energy saving behavior of the device, as android tends to shutdown processes occasionally. Which is pretty bad for a DNS server IMHO
I hear you, but I'm pretty happy with how this is working out, the advantage here is that it blocks ads and trackers for the whole network so it works on my wife's devices without her having to do anything (which she wouldn't anyway)