Not sure why a full desktop required, perhaps a Raspberry pi 5 16gb,
the pi 500+ or any other mini pc or a cheap chromebook would be enough to start, obviously depends on the kid's interests
Just and FYI, whilst they are supporting it, they only provide source. If you want the images you need to be a paying customer, or build them yourself.
it depends on your needs, but for me I set it up as the dhcp server and configure the router to go through the pihole. If you want to share it family and friends there is no better tool than tailscale, you can configure the pihole as an exit node.
it's a good post, however I agree with the comments there and here that a raspberry pi 5 with 8gb ram is an overkill for just running pihole. a good old Raspberry Pi 3 Model B with 1gb ram it's enough and it will still have capacity to run other things there. And of course pihole can run on an old laptop or desktop box you already have so no need to buy a device just for the sake of it. I would rather not run it as a docker container thou but that's just my preference
Yup, I am using a Pi 3B as well. Silent, passive-cooling case, 16GB µSD card which is at least twice as big as it needs to be, and it uses about 10% of RAM and 10% of CPU.
I enabled `unattended-upgrades` and set it to do all types of update. I've never caught it in a reboot but it's always current. It swaps to ZRAM for less load on the µSD card.
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