Technology Sep 11, 2026 · 1 min read

Building a Pi-hole Home Lab From an Old PC : Why

I've been learning Linux command line and going through MIT's Missing Semester course over the past few weeks, and I wanted a real project to apply it to instead of just following along with exercises. A friend is sending me an old PC next week, and my plan is to turn it into a Pi-hole — a network-...

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by ghchattaoui-bit
Building a Pi-hole Home Lab From an Old PC : Why

I've been learning Linux command line and going through MIT's Missing Semester course over the past few weeks, and I wanted a real project to apply it to instead of just following along with exercises.

A friend is sending me an old PC next week, and my plan is to turn it into a Pi-hole — a network-wide DNS ad/tracker blocker that runs on your own hardware instead of relying on browser extensions. I picked this because it touches a bunch of things I want to actually understand: Linux system administration, networking, and just generally how to keep a small server running.

I don't know much about networking yet beyond the basics, so I expect to break things. That's kind of the point — I'm documenting this as I go, mistakes included, instead of writing it up after the fact and making it look cleaner than it was.

Current status: waiting on the PC to arrive Tuesday. Next post will be the OS install and initial setup.

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This article was originally published by DEV Community and written by ghchattaoui-bit.

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