Pi-Hole with Wireguard using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Full Tunnel or Split Tunnel IPv6 + IPv4 Wireguard VPN connections to an ad blocking Pi-Hole server, from your Android, iOS, Chrome OS, Linux, macOS, & Windows devices

The goal of this project is to enable you to safely and privately use the Internet on your phones, tablets, and computers with a self-run VPN Server in the cloud, or on your own hardware in your home. This software shields you from intrusive advertisements. It blocks your ISP, cell phone company, public WiFi hotspot provider, and apps/websites from gaining insight into your usage activity.

Both Full Tunnel (all traffic) and Split Tunnel (DNS traffic only) VPN connections provide DNS based ad-blocking over an encrypted connection to the cloud. The differences are:

• A Split Tunnel VPN allows you to interact with devices on your Local Network (such as a Chromecast or Roku).
• A Full Tunnel VPN can help bypass misconfigured proxies on corporate WiFi networks and protects you from Man-In-The-Middle SSL proxies.

Tunnel Type	Data Usage	Server CPU Load	Security	Ad Blocking	Bandwidth usage
full	+10% overhead for vpn	low	100% encryption	yes	Local & Oracle Network
split	just kilobytes per day	very low	dns encryption only	yes	Local + few KBs on OCI

When you use full tunnel, you consume bandwidth on your local network as well as from Oracle Cloud network. Oracle offers 10 TB network traffic per month with cap on speed around 10 Mbps. Using the split tunnel consumes data only from your local network with some MB data from Oracle Cloud network, but your internet speed is not capped.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides more than the cloud instance. Check the full list here.

While Pi-hole was originally authored to run on a Raspberry Pi, people have followed this guide to deploy securely hosted instances of Pi-hole with VPN only access on Google Cloud, AWS, Heroku, Azure, Linode, Digital Ocean, Oracle Cloud, and on spare hardware at home.

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Quickstart

1. I suggest using Ubuntu 22.04 image provided by Oracle, you can also use Ubuntu 20.04 as the Wireguard Module natively shipped in the Linux Kernel.

2. Download and execute setup.sh from this repository to:

   1. install the latest Wireguard packages

   2. install the latest Pi-Hole, and configure it to accept DNS requests from the Wireguard interface

   3. display a QR Code for 1 Split Tunnel VPN Profile, so you can import the VPN Profile to your device without having to type anything

sudo su -
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/anbuchelva/Pi-hole-and-Wireguard-on-Oracle-Cloud-always-free-tier/master/setup.sh
chmod +x setup.sh
bash ./setup.sh

3. Make sure your router or firewall is forwarding incoming UDP packets on Port 51515 to the Ubuntu Server, that you ran the setup.sh script on.

4. Create another VPN Client Profile by running ./setup.sh again, you can create 253 profiles without modifying the script.

5. Enable Wireguard VPN Connections on your devices

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Server Setup Guide

Set up a Pi-Hole Ad Blocking VPN Server with a static Anycast IP on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's Always Free Usage Tier

You can run your own privacy-first ad blocking service within the Free Usage Tier on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Step 1 of this guide gets you set up with a Oracle Cloud account, and Step 2 walks you through setting up a full tunnel or split tunnel VPN connection on your Android & iOS devices, and computers.

This simple 2 step process will get you up and running:

• STEP 1 Oracle Cloud Login, Account Creation, & Server Provisioning

• STEP 2 Software Installation & Configuration

There is no value in setting up DNS over HTTPS or DNS over TLS on a cloud hosted instance, because your DNS requests to the cloud are encrypted by Wireguard.

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Client Setup Guide

To connect and use the VPN, you will need to install the Wireguard VPN software on your device or computer: Review some common Wireguard VPN Client configuration steps

Delete Clients from Server

Print list of all clients on the server:

sudo wg show

Sample output may look like this:

peer: txUZ0iqCyu69qQFq08U420hOp3/A4lYtrHVrJrAYBys=
  preshared key: (hidden)
  endpoint: 99.99.99.99:99999
  allowed ips: 10.66.66.2/32, fd42:42:42::2/128
  latest handshake: 4 days, 20 hours, 4 minutes, 20 seconds ago
  transfer: 4.20 MiB received, 4.20 MiB sent

Make note of the unique string after the word peer: for the client you wish to delete. In the example above, it is txUZ0iqCyu69qQFq08U420hOp3/A4lYtrHVrJrAYBys=.

Remove the client:

sudo wg set wg0 peer txUZ0iqCyu69qQFq08U420hOp3/A4lYtrHVrJrAYBys= remove

Replace txUZ0iqCyu69qQFq08U420hOp3/A4lYtrHVrJrAYBys= in the command above with the appropriate peer: you wish to delete on your server.

Contributions Welcome

If there is something that can be done better, or if this documentation can be improved in any way, please submit a Pull Request with your fixes or edits.

You may aware that this repository is forked from Rajann Patel's Google Cloud Repo. So, whatever the issues highlighted there might be applicable here as well.

Please feel free to create pull requests if you have better knowlege on networking or Oracle Cloud Instance.

All credits goes to Rajann Patel.

DISCLAIMER

I have been working for Oracle since November 2022. However, this does not change the fact that I will not receive any benefits if you make any future purchases on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

SPONSORSHIP / DONATIONS

I would appreciate if you support the projects that made this possible.

Pi-hole Project: https://pi-hole.net/donate/

Wireguard Project: https://www.wireguard.com/donations/

Ranjann Patel: https://github.com/sponsors/rajannpatel