I’ve been learning Linux command line and going through MIT’s Missing Semester course over the past few weeks, and I wanted a real project to apply it to instead of just following along with exercises.
A friend is sending me an old PC next week, and my plan is to turn it into a Pi-hole — a network-wide DNS ad/tracker blocker that runs on your own hardware instead of relying on browser extensions. I picked this because it touches a bunch of things I want to actually understand: Linux system administration, networking, and just generally how to keep a small server running.
I don’t know much about networking yet beyond the basics, so I expect to break things. That’s kind of the point — I’m documenting this as I go, mistakes included, instead of writing it up after the fact and making it look cleaner than it was.
Current status: waiting on the PC to arrive Tuesday. Next post will be the OS install and initial setup.