My Pi-Hole installation has been up and operational for a continuous eight days. In that time it’s picked up an extra 10,000 or so domains on its blocklist. I’ve not had any problems, except when I use Google or other Google-based search engines that use Google, such as Startpage. When I click on one of the clearly marked ad results, I get a page that says “googleadservices … refused to connect,” with an ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED. That’s Pi-Hole at work. It’s also why I use DuckDuckGo as my search engine. No ads at the top of the search results.

It looks like anything that is being supplied by one of the domains on the blocklist will fail to load or properly execute. CNN for example has a smattering videos that won’t play behind the Pi-Hole. I know it must be Pi-Hole because if I turn off WiFi on my iPhone and just use cellular, then everything plays just fine. Turn on WiFi again to my home network, and the CNN videos that wouldn’t play before, won’t play again.

iOS games from the App Store are also another interesting casualty. Quite a few games are free to play because they show ads either in-game or stop and show an ad intermittently. With Pi-Hole blocking ad domains, none of that occurs. I don’t know if the apps are broken in some way if they can’t find the ad server, but it doesn’t matter. I’ll play such games for about 10 minutes, 15 tops, and then decide to delete them. With ads running in the apps I usually have them deleted with 5 minutes of downloading to try out.

I have yet to find anything on the internet I would turn off the Pi-Hole for. If the feature or service is so entangled in an ad domain that it won’t properly operate, then I bid that feature and service adieu and move on. Life with Pi-Hole is good.