# Pihole DNS on Unifi

There is quite a lot of information out there on how to setup a whole home Ad Blocker with Unifi and PiHole. So, I will not attempt to rewrite those tutorials. Rather I will focus on a few sticky points that I encountered and how I resolved them. 

For starters this is now my second time setting up PiHole on a Raspberry Pi to function as my in home DNS server. The first time I set it up I used the service for over a year and it was great. Then I  [moved](https://blog.mountaintopcoding.com/big-changes-underway)  and I decided to go with a fresh Raspberry Pi OS and PiHole install before setting it up in my new home. 

---

I followed  [this](https://youtu.be/Np-JqnPzEYw)  "tutorial" on YouTube but the first place I got stuck was figuring out my Raspberry Pi's IP address. 

The solution was to connect an external mouse, keyboard, and monitor to my Raspberry PI (after I had used the Raspberry Pi Imager to install a fresh OS on a MicroSD). Once the external devices were connected I connected the Raspberry Pi to my wi-fi network. Since I have a Unifi Dream Machine I was able to get the IP directly off of the GUI for the router. However, if you do not have that option you can always enter 
```
ifconfig wlan0
``` 
in the Raspberry Pi's terminal.

Once I had the Raspberry Pi's IP I thought I would be able to SSH into it. However, when 
I gave it a shot I kept getting an odd error message about a man in the middle attack possibility because my "secrets did not match" (I think I had an old key for the IP address from a botched earlier install process before I figured out what my IP address was - hence the reason for this post). 

So, I went to `/Users/<myusername>/.ssh` then `nano known-hosts` and I deleted the ssh-rsa for the Raspberry Pi's IP address. Then I shut down the Raspberry PI, ejected the MicroSD, and inserted it into my machine. Then in the terminal (I use iTerm2) I went to `cd Volumes/boot` (note: your SD cards name may be different), entered `sudo touch ssh` followed by my machine's master password, then entered `cd ..` so that I could eject the SD card and reinserted it back into my Raspberry Pi. Once it had booted back up I was finally able to SSH into my Raspberry Pi and go through the Raspberry Pi install process outlined in the above mentioned tutorial.

![Boulder-1500.jpg](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1640459191645/cE9WGeyWJ.jpeg)

So, after all that I was finally able to get Pihole installed and up and running on my Unifi home network. As an aside I found  [this](https://youtu.be/BezoNUflqXo)  video very informative in getting a more advanced home network setup and running. If you have any questions feel to reach out at https://mountaintopcoding.dev/ or in the comments below. Cheers!