[Raspberry Pi General] Oswald Boelcke:
ATTENTION (update on 2018-04-09): The procedures described in this thread are only working if you own an internet account with a public IPv4 address or dual stack i.e. both, public IPv4 and public IPv6 addresses. For account with only a public IPv6 address, it won't work. Please also refer to post #16.

Although I'd already read quite a lot about commercial VPN providers, reading of this article "VPN Leaks Found on 3 Major VPNs out of … 3 that We Tested" clearly established my decision to go for my own private VPN.

Thanks to Mike Kuketz who's running an excellent German blog regarding information technology security, I was able to study these two articles (https://www.kuketz-blog.de/pi-hole-schwarzes-loch-fuer-werbung-raspberry-pi-teil1/, https://www.kuketz-blog.de/pivpn-raspberry-pi-mit-openvpn-raspberry-pi-teil3/) about Pi-hole and PiVPN on/via a Raspberry Pi and immediately decided to purchase a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ (including an official case and charger) from an authorised Raspberry Pi dealer. Remark for German speaking XDA users: Mike also runs a very interesting forum in conjunction with his blog.

I'd be glad if this thread raises or raised your interest in a Raspberry Pi with Pi-hole and PiVPN. We are fascinated by their capabilities and glad to be able to utilise our own private VPN. If you also decide to go for it I hope that this tutorial facilitates setup and configuration. However, always be aware and remember that different scenario exist why use of a VPN might be reasonable. To anonymously browse the web via a VPN-provider certainly doesn't belong to that. The desire for anonymity and privacy in the world wide web is a reasonable wish of many users that can unfortunately hardly be implemented or only by extremely high efforts. You do not achieve anonymity while browsing the web, only because your network traffic is tunneled via a VPN-provider. This is only a promotional promise belonging into the category of modern fairy tales of the internet. However, by use of a (private) VPN you certainly enhance your privacy due to the encryption of your data traffic in this case between the Android device and the Raspberry Pi / PiVPN.

Intent of this thread is to share my experiences and procedure during the setup of the Raspberry Pi, Pi-hole and PiVPN. As client (or you might call it the companion of PiVPN) on our Android devices, I use OpenVPN for Android by Arne Schwabe. I downloaded it from F-Droid; however, it's also available via the Google Play Store. Possibly interesting to a few Android users might be that it does not require root. The whole setup is positively working on our Android Nougat ROM but I don't have any experiences with Android Oreo.

Additionally I want to clearly emphasise that I personally used Mike's two above linked articles written in German i.e. my thread is more or less only a translation of Mike's instruction into English. Therefore, I must clearly state that all credits go to Mike Kuketz.

Generally, in this thread I don't intend to discuss the reasons that induced my decision to establish my own private VPN or to create my own Network-wide ad blocking. Already brief searches of the web are providing multiple hits in this context but it's anyway a very private decision.

Additionally, I'm only focusing on our router, an AVM Fritz!Box 7390, our Android devices (Samsung Galaxy S3 LTE - i9305, all with RR-N-v5.8.5-final, Magisk v16.0, Xposed, XPrivacyLua and GApps-free thanks to microG), and Windows 10 Pro on a notebook (just started to familarise myself with Linux Mint i.e. all work in regard to this thread was conducted under Windows). I'm convinced that all interested readers of this thread are capable to translate/transfer the basic ideas to other routers, devices or Linux, iOS etc.

Content:

Post #2: Initial Installation of the Raspberry Pi

Post #3: The Pi-hole

Post #4: PiVPN

Post #5: PiVPN in Combination with the Pi-Hole

Post #6: OpenVPN for Android

Post #7: Dynamic DNS

Post #8: Customisation of the NTP-Server

Post #9: Unbound / Recursive DNS server

Remark:

In the attached screenshots, IP-addresses are blacked out for privacy reasons.

Please advise if something is not clear, incorrect or incomplete.

Off topic comments are allowed as long they are generally related to the overall topic, are in the general interest of the followers of this thread and add value to the thread. Having fun is always welcomed here. The ultimate decision rests with me as the OP!