Pi Hole

Self inflicted pain means I am about done with Pi Hole as a network wide ad blocker.

Been a somewhat happy Pi Hole user for about 7 years. Its a script that you run on a Raspberry Pi that installs a DNS (DNS is the thing that looks up say google.com and converts it an IP address over the Internet) ad blocker. They maintain lists of known ad servers and when the website you are on goes out to that URL to get said ad, pi hole, well, dumps it in a back hole and you don't see the ad in the website you are on.

You can white list sites to keep their ad revenue going if you so choose.
It can also work as a DHCP server. That's the service that hands out IP addresses on the network for the connecting device.

Harmless update... I needed to white list Google Analytics for a test for our church streaming. Noticed there was an update pending, so did the usual thing of clicking the link and doing the update. Big mistake.

Of course it broke. And because it both hands out IP address and resolves hostnames, I was high and dry.
How so?
About 2 hours into trying to get the v6 stuff working I gave up and grabbed a new SD card to load fresh.
Only I could not get the raspberry pi OS from the website.
Got around that.
Then I could not get the new Pi to get an IP address.
That's when I gave up.
I was now about 4 hours into a simple process that I have done countless times over the years.
The Internet is just rife with people complaining about the update breakage.
Many were a lot more angry and frustrated than I was.... I knew exactly what services were broken and somewhat how to get around them (to a point).

The self inflicted bit came when I could not find where my Edge Router Max was pointing the DNS/DHCP services to the IP of the now broken Pi Hole.

Anyway, I am now running a light weight DNS ad block IP address in my router and have some ads, but nothing to horrible, as an upside, I can now look at my Google Analytics and see that 10 people are reading this blog.
I can also hit this blog from inside the house... In the 17 years we've been here I've never been able to read/edit my own blog from inside the network, I've always needed to jump through some remote typing loops to add new posts and read them.

This whole process should really be a longer philosophical discussion about maintaining free software... I never paid for it, I should not expect it to work or keep working.
Bit like my ACARS website really.
I think the introspective bit comes from the number of people using it.
Me, about 200 folks hit my site a day. I am very very up front that my site/code is a dumpster fire.
Also, if it goes down... eh, go outside and walk barefoot on the grass.

Pi Hole must have 1,000,000 + folks, if not a million, very close to it and they have quite a few software devs on the project. If it goes down, your home network is borked.
Thus I think the QA (quality assurance) cycle should be a LOT more robust.

As a LOT of people on the net said, if nothing else, there should have been a pop up message on the update script with a pause saying "This might break things - are you sure Y/N".
I would have stuck with v5, done a google analytics white list and been none the wiser and none the stressed.

And yes, I really think the Internet is both broken and unusable without some sort of ad blocking.
I've just come back from about 2 weeks of working remote on Amy and Cole's Internet and it was stunning just how horrible doing work is with the ads thrown at you. (And don't get me started how spoilt I felt with my 1g/1g fiber here vs their 200m/10m dsl).