Blinken Pi-hole

The Blinken Pi-hole service shows visually various information of individual DNS requests on a Unicorn HAT.

Pi-hole is a DNS sinkhole aka A BLACK HOLE FOR INTERNET ADVERTISEMENTS.

The Unicorn HAT is a LED matrix of 64 (8 x 8) RGB LEDs.

Colors

The display will show the following colors

• red - blocked
• green - cached
• blue - secure
• yellow - forwarded
• cyan - query
• pink - insecure
• orange - reply
• ltgreen - dhcp
• white - dnssec-query

Requirements

• Raspberry Pi (tested with a Raspberry Pi 3B)
• Python 2.7 (tested with 2.7.13)
• Pi-hole installed
• unicornhat

Install unicorn hat

$ sudo apt-get install python-pip python-dev
$ sudo pip install unicornhat

Attention!

unicornhat needs root access to function. Therefore this service runs as root user.

Installation

$ sudo cp blipih.py /usr/local/sbin
$ sudo chmod 744 /usr/local/sbin/blipih.py
$ sudo cp blipih.service /lib/systemd/system/blipih.service
$ sudo chmod 644 /lib/systemd/system/blipih.service
$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl enable blipih.service

Change Crontab to restart the Blinken Pi-hole service after the daily logrotate

Open crontab file /etc/cron.d/pihole look for pihole flush once quiet

# Pi-hole: Flush the log daily at 00:00
#          The flush script will use logrotate if available
#          parameter "once": logrotate only once (default is twice)
#          parameter "quiet": don't print messages
00 00   * * *   root    PATH="$PATH:/usr/local/bin/" pihole flush once quiet

and add the following to /etc/cron.d/pihole. The job should start one minute after the pihole flush once quiet

#
# Restart the Blinken Pi-hole service after the logrotate
00 01	* * *	root /bin/systemctl restart blipih.service

Check after each pihole -up that this entry still exists