Intro
Recently, I setup a Raspberry Pi 4 (rpi) with Pi-hole so that I wouldn’t get bombarded with banner ads while I surfed the web. It works great, but only if I’m at the house using my Wifi.
{% include figure image_path=“/assets/images/pihole/pi-hole-stats.png” alt=“Pi-hole dashboard” caption=“Pi-hole admin dashboard” %}
Now that the pandemic is nearly over and we can go and mingle outside, I want to be able to leave the house, yet not see any ads.
The simplest/old way of doing this is to create a VPN connection back to the rpi and then going about my business. I thought about setting up Wireguard on the Raspberry Pi but kept running into issues when setting up client keys.. The main issue probably being my own stupidity.
Then I remembered some tweets from people I follow mentioning Tailscale and how it provided them with a no hassle private network, so I thought I’d try it out. It’s been 24 hours and things are working great, so I decided to share this blog post.
Goal
Be able to access/use the Pi-hole server at home, when I’m out and about on someone else’s wifi, or using my mobile data plan.
Requirements
- An account at Tailscale
- Tailscale client on your phone
- Tailscale client on your Raspberry Pi
- Pihole-FTL (DNS server) running/accessible to all active clients within your Tailscale organization.
Signing up and getting a client up and running on your mobile device is very simple, so I’m not going to get into it here.
Install Tailscale on the Raspberry Pi
I am assuming you have installed Raspian, or Raspian Lite on your Pi, and not some other flavor of Linux.
Start with the simple instructions on how to install Tailscale on a Pi .
Once the client is running on the Pi, go to your Tailscale dashboard and verify that all your clients are showing up properly. {% include figure image_path=“/assets/images/pihole/tailscale-machine-list.png” alt=“tailscale machine list” caption=“Tailscale Machine List” %}
Verify connectivity from one client to the other with a simple ping.
{% include figure image_path=“/assets/images/pihole/tailscale-machine-ping.png” alt=“Tailscale ping” caption=“Tailscale Machine Ping” %}
Reconfigure Pi-hole
Login to the Pi-hole admin interface, go to Settings -> DNS and make sure that interface listening behavior is set to Listen on all interfaces, permit all origins.
{% include figure image_path=“/assets/images/pihole/pihole-dns-permit-all-origins.png” alt=“Pihole DNS Setting” caption=“Make sure the permit all origins is turned on.” %}
Verify Admin Inteface is accessible via Tailscale IP
{% include figure image_path=“/assets/images/pihole/pihole-admin-on-tailscale-interface.png” alt=“Pihole Admin” caption=“Notice the ip address is one that Tailscale assigned the rpi” %}
You should also make sure that you can connect to port 53 of the Tailscale IP.
nc -v -z 100.114.93.47 53 ◉ ◼◼◼◼◻◻◻◻◻◻
Connection to 100.114.93.47 port 53 [tcp/domain] succeeded!
~ ⮀
»Configure Tailscale to use this rpi as the DNS server for all clients.
Now tell Tailscale to use this ip address as the Nameserver for all clients.
{% include figure image_path=“/assets/images/pihole/tailscale-dns-settings-override-local-dns.png” alt=“Tailscale DNS ” caption=“Make sure the ‘override localdns’ option is set. ” %}
And you’re all set!.