Introduction IPv6 was drafted in the mid-1990s when it was realized that IPv4 addresses would quickly be exhausted due to the explosive growth of the Internet. Since the IPv4 protocol was originally a research project, approximately 4.3 billion unique IP addresses was considered more than enough. I doubt many imagined our current world where nearly everything would be connected to the Internet. Various techniques such as assigning smaller sized networks to organizations and the utilization of NAT (Network Address Translation) helped extend the time before IPv4 addresses would be exhausted.

Now that you have Pi-hole and Portainer setup within Docker (perhaps on a Raspberry Pi (affiliate link)?) and you notice that an update is available for Pi-hole, you may be wondering, “How do I update Pi-hole”? Sure, you can pull a new image and restart it via the command line. However, you have a nice graphical interface setup and you may enjoy looking at it rather than a console window (sacrilege for the command line folks, I know).

Introduction I purchased the budget friendly TP-Link T2600G-28TS L2 managed switch (affiliate link) for my home network since I wanted to be able to segregate the devices on my network to help address the security concerns of hosting public services and using various IoT devices. (A word of caution: if you are a married man, you may have a desire to accomplish this task without frustrating your wife by adding unnecessary complexity or by excessive network outages while you are building out your network.

Introduction Network port isolation is one way you can restrict communication between network devices. You can restrict certain PCs from accessing your server, for instance, or you may even prevent certain devices from accessing the Internet by blocking communication with the switch port connected to your router. Port isolation may be used to increase the security of your IoT devices by only allowing access to the port connected to your router.

In my home network I wanted to set up a dedicated Pi-hole installation so that I could have network-wide ad blocking. Additionally, I could reduce the telemetry/tracking performed by applications and operating systems as well as potentially block malware. Pi-hole provides the ability to view the DNS traffic on my network on a per device basis, which may present valuable insight in detecting unusual activity on the network. While OPNsense can be configured to provide DNS blocking, I really like the graphs and logging of Pi-hole.