Pi-Hole with 1.1.1.1 & Google Cloud Print
April 12, 2018
Why private DNS service
After FCC’s repeal of the net neutrality laws, I decided to bypass the ISP’s DNS server altogether and make DNS lookup for my Home fast and secure. While looking for a solution for this, I stumbled upon Pi-Hole https://pi-hole.net/ it’s a small software which could run on Linux based OS and it also serves as an ad-blocker and malicious site blocker and can be flashed on Raspberry Pi. https://www.raspberrypi.org/ .
I had a Qualcomm dragon board handy so I flashed Debian Linux on 410c Dragonboard by following instructions here
https://www.96boards.org/documentation/consumer/dragonboard410c/downloads/debian.md.html
After bringing up the board with Linux, I connected to the internet over Wi-Fi and installed Pi-Hole by running
curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash
The installation procedure was simple, fast and after playing with configuration for few munites it was up and running and all my devices are now blocking trackers, malicious websites and other nasty stuff. As some of the stuff is not getting downloaded the pages load a little faster as well on all my devices.
Further Utilization of the DragonBoard
As so far the dragon board was just serving Pi-Hole, I decided to plug that with my local USB printer, install CUPS and google cloud print driver to make it a cloud-ready printer
Install CUPS and GCP Cloud connector
GCP Cloud Connector: https://github.com/google/cloud-print-connector
sudo apt-get install cups sudo apt-get install google-cloud-print-connector
CUPS Web Page
You should see your printer here if you have already attached to USB or if its a wifi enabled printer you should see it here as well.
https://
GCP initialization
gcp-connector-util init
Follow the prompts and then run
gcp-cups-connector -config-filename gcp-cups-connector.config.json
After this, you can setup gcp-cups-connector as a service and you are good to go.
Next Step
Install Cloudflare and configure it DoH proxy
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-argo-tunnel-with-rust-and-raspberry-pi/
This will make all the DNS queries over HTTPS and save some of my time