Oracle Cloud Free Tier VPS with Pi-hole ad-blocker

Oracle Cloud Free Tier give you 2 compute VPS to use. It is a very good option to setup pi-hole ad-blocker for home/personal usage.

Follow below step to setup the VPS and pi-hole.

1. Register Oracle Cloud Free Tier.

2. Setup a Always Free Eligible compute instance with Ubuntu 20.04 minimal. You can always choose other free OS like Oracle Linux or CentOS, use what is familiar for you.

3. Make sure to assign a public IP address for your VPS.

4. Remember to download or use your own ssh key as you need this for your ssh connection to your VPS.

5.  Once your VPS is running, connect to your VPS via SSH using the public IP given.

6. Follow pi-hole official site for the installation.

7. On your VPS' Ubuntu instance, edit /etc/iptables/rules.v4 to allow port 53 for DNS and 80 for the HTTP web admin page. Remember to restart iptables or your instance for the iptables rules to take effect.

8. Beside the Ubuntu's firewall, you also need to allow port 80 and 53 (ingress rules) on the Oracle Cloud's VPS/Virtual Cloud Network (VCN). It is recommend to create a Network Security Group with the ingress rules and attached it to your VPC.

9.  Once done, double check port 80 and 53 is open to internet.

10. Once all port is reachable, you can open the pi-hole admin page via http://vps-public-ip/admin.

11. Configure your router or pc to use the VPS' public ip as DNS. Then all is done and you can monitor the query from the pi-hole web admin page.

 

 

12. Optional router DNS setup if your router is using DNSMASQ for OpenWrt or FreshTomato.