Introduction
This project repurposes an unused BeagleBone to act as a Pi-Hole in my home network. The current version of Pi-Hole is 4.3.2 at the time of writing.
Preparation
Flash the BeagleBone’s SD card (on Mac)
The first step is to install an OS on the BeagleBone’s SD card. A 4GB SD card is enough to hold a small Debian image and Pi-Hole. My choice is the official Debian 9.9 IoT image. On Mac, extract the image, and copy it onto the SD card.
$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *251.0 GB disk0
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_APFS Container disk1 250.8 GB disk0s2
...
Find the SD card’s ID (/dev/diskX). Then, unmount the partitions
on this disk:
$ diskutil unmountdisk /dev/diskX
Then flash the card:
$ dd if=~/Downloads/bone-debian-9.9-iot-armhf-2019-08-03-4gb.img of=/dev/diskX bs=2m
Modify the package setup
Boot the BeagleBone. After logging in, first of all change the
password for user debian:
$ passwd
Then, update the packages:
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt upgrade
The Debian IoT image contains a couple of things that are either
unnecessary, or interfere with Pi-Hole. We don’t need NodeJS, and
Cloud 9 IDE. We also will not use nginx; Pi-Hole uses
lighttpd. We’ll first fix this:
$ sudo apt remove --purge nodejs
$ sudo apt remove --purge c9-core-installer
$ sudo apt remove --purge nginx nginx-common
Pi-Hole 4.x uses dnsmasq, but uses its own, built-in version (in
pihole-FTL). The original one will interfere with Pi-Hole, so we
remove that one as well:
$ sudo apt remove --purge dnsmasq
Finally, we remove the SoftAp0 configuration file, and make sure that
the SoftAp0 configuration file for dnsmasq is not regenerated each
time on boot: the presence of .SoftAp0 in /etc/dnsmasq.d
prevents the auto-generation of the SoftAp0 file:
$ sudo rm /etc/dnsmasq.d/SoftAp0
$ sudo touch /etc/dnsmasq.d/.SoftAp0
Installation
Clone the Pi-Hole repository:
$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole.git pi-hole
Execute installation script:
$ sudo bash pi-hole/automated\ install/basic-install.sh
You can accept all defaults during installation. If you choose to turn the current IP settings into a static configuration, make sure to set the IP address as a static address on the router’s DHCP server, so that it is not accidentally leased to another device.
Finally, log into the admin console, and update the Gravity blocklists. In the Tools menu on the left, select “Update Gravity”. On the “Update Gravity (list of blocked domains)” screen, press the “Update” button. This will download the blocklists.