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A Bookmark to Temporarily Disable your Pi-hole

I use a Pi-hole on my home network and I love it! It works by configuring your local network to use the Pi-hole as the DNS server, and the Pi-hole refuses to resolve domains of sites you want to block. It does a pretty good job of blocking everything from unwanted trackers to ads and malware. Sometimes, though, it’s annoying because it blocks a link that I actually want to visit. Maybe I’m trying to visit a sponsored Google link, an Amazon product link, or a link from an email. In any case, I just don’t want the link to be blocked, and the Pi-hole gets in the way. This can be inconvenient because the usual process to temporarily allow blocked traffic is to open the Pi-hole admin page in a new tab, login, and click the link to disable it in the menu. Too much work! So I came up with a slightly easier way. I use a bookmark in my bookmarks toolbar that will disable the Pi-hole for 30 seconds.

Do you want a “Disable Pi-hole” bookmark for your own Pi-hole? You can generate one using the form below! You’ll need the IP address of your own Pi-hole (on your local network). (Pro tip: You can use pi.hole in place of the IP address for most Pi-hole setups. Try it and see if it works for you!) You’ll also need the webpassword, which you can get by running cat /etc/pihole/setupVars.conf on your Pi-hole (probably via ssh). I find 30s to be a good default duration for it to be disabled, but you can adjust that as well if you want. Then just save the link as a bookmark (for example, by right-clicking it) and you’re done!




Bookmark this link: Disable Pi-hole (30s)

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About the Author

Mike Kasberg

👋 Hi, I'm Mike! I'm a husband, I'm a father, and I'm a senior software engineer at Strava. I use Ubuntu Linux daily at work and at home. And I enjoy writing about Linux, open source, programming, 3D printing, tech, and other random topics.