The amount of traffic on a network has always fascinated me. I know when you set up a new Windows PC on of the first things it dose is send out a message looking for anything out their. Looking to connect and discover what kind of network its on and where it can go.

This is neat and all, but it leads to a few other things. Watching my network, using Wireshark I cant but help and see all the things trying to get into my network. This is normal, but what got me was the amount trying to get out of my network.

Now I am not talking about the normal request, like when you use Youtube, or any website. I am taking about my smart TV sending messages out. My kids tablet, sending packets out when its in sleep mode. Worst of all my ISP keeps sending packets back and forth, that have nothing to do with my internet.

Inside all of these packets is nothing but information on me and my family. Our watching habits, things we like. All being sent to advertisers. Well I needed to put a stop to this.

So I did some looking around and found out about Pihole. Its a DNS server set up by a group of people who had the same problem I had. So they set up this DNS server that runs on a Raspberry Pi.

Well after some research, I had to have this and I found a very good guide to set things up.

After following along. Soon everything was set up and I was already seeing results. All those pesky packets stopped, in the GUI I can see everything that was being blocked and everything that was getting through. The only thing I wish it would do is block the adds on Youtube, but that would mean blocking all of Youtube as they send the adds through there domain.

The next part of my Building JARVIS series is now up!

Now that we had our network cabinet in place, I turned my attention to JARVIS’s hardware. While I want to keep this relatively budget friendly, I also want to make sure JARVIS will be robust and durable enough to be reliable 24/7 for us. If we’re going to have a locally hosted solution for our files and services, JARVIS needs to be up to the task. While I’ve been building my own PCs since the…

can she not?

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