Hi All,
Here’s a really off-topic question for you.
If it is too off-topic for this forum, please let me know and I will delete it.
I have an old Android box that is stuck on Android 6.0 which is no longer being supported by Google (no security updates and no access to the Playstore).
I did have pihole up and running on it, and it was great.
The only concern I had was how vulnerable was that Android box given the list of vulnerabilities with Android 6.
After much effort I was able to get Manjaro xfce running on this box, off of the sd card and without wifi.
If I can’t get pihole or adguard up and running on this little box, just how risky is it if I simply continued to use Android 6.0 to run pihole which would be connected via wifi to my router?
That is the only thing that this Android box would be used for.
While I’m not a security expert or anything like that, I’d imagine if it was properly firewalled, and couldn’t be accessed publicly, I’d say it’s pretty safe.
That said, I’d say see if you can get an Ubuntu LTS (there is an ARM version as well) running on it. I’ve got Ubuntu LTS on my Raspberry Pi, with Pihole, and it’s working, well… not like a bomb, it’s not exploding, but absolutely fabulously.
Thank you both, @mithrial and @Mirdarthos, so much for you help, I really appreciate it!
The Android box was already rooted so I installed a Firewall that does not share any data and proceeded to block absolutely everything that isn’t absolutely necessary for Pi-Hole and Unbound to run.
Pi-Hole and Unbound run great on this old Android box and it only consumes 2W of power.
I did run into a couple of odd issues.
For some reason I could not access pi-hole from another computer when I had the Android box connected using Ethernet. The Ethernet connection was working and my router had the correct mac address of the Ethernet port.
I am able to access the pi-hole just fine when the Android box is connected via WiFi.
In my Router, I set up Cloudfare as a secondary DNS, just in case my Android box goes down, I won’t lose my internet connection.
The other issue I ran into was my cell phone not using the pi-hole dns server. I have an Android phone and it took me a minute to figure this out.
I went to the WiFi settings, clicked on the WiFi network that I was using and under advanced settings set the IP Settings to Static and then had to manually enter the pi-holes IP address in BOTH DNS address locations.
Now I can brows the web from my cell phone, at home, practically ad free.
Sorry for my rambling answer, I just thought I would share this additional information in case it helps someone and to make this story a little more interesting.
I would like to mark both of your responses as solutions but unfortunately I can only pick one, but I really want to thank you both for your help!