Executive Summary: An online advertisement is a new form of marketing which is using the internet for reaching consumers. We can see different types of ads while surfing the internet or while opening a website. Banner ads are one of the types of advertisements. Nowadays many businesses are using these ads because they are cheaper, and they will reach more consumers than any other forms of advertisement.  Based on the recent surveys, the majority of internet users are not interested in seeing these ads (vieodesign, 2019). The reason is that they are interrupting their browsing, they are seeing the wrong ads and are afraid that whether they are scams or not. Even for reading international or local news the user has to go through a large number of ads. To remove these types of ads many ad-blockers are available. Browsers like Chrome, Firefox and internet explorer are providing different plugins for ad-blocking. 

The problem with the existing techniques is that the software’s for ad blocking should be installed in each device of the network. Ad-Block, Ad-block+, Ad-guard are some of the software used by many users. So, our project idea is to implement an ad-blocking system for the entire network. This system is implemented on a dedicated server. 

Our team aims to spend $0.00 on the devices or parts of machines that we will use to build the project. The team is going to use old but functional hardware to maximize its use. All the software using are open source like FreeNAS, ubuntu, pi-hole. 

Goal: Our goal is to build an ad-blocker for the entire network instead of a single pc without any investment. This can be implemented both in a home network and in an organisational network. By implementing this in an organisation, the workload of the system/network administrators will be reduced. 

Background: The software used for this project is FreeNAS, Ubuntu, Pi-hole. FreeNAS is an open-source operating system which is capable of running VM’s(virtualized machines) the minimum requirement for installing FreeNAS is 8Gb RAM, 500Gb HDD, and Multicore 64-bit processor. On this platform, an ubuntu server is installed(virtualized) which is another open-source OS. The main software used in this project is Pi-hole. 

This pi-hole can be used as an internal DNS server. By making the configuration in a way that all the traffic uses this internal DNS server, we can accomplish the task of blocking the ads. All the software’s and tools used are open sources, so this will cost 0$. 

Objectives 

• Recycle old machines and hardware 
• Implementing a low-cost system to block the online advertisement 
• Use the internet with ease and without any interruption 
• Filter unwanted contents from the internet 

Justification: The fundamental idea of this project is to develop a low cost and easy method to implement an adblocker for an entire network. Low cost can be achieved by using recycled machines and open source software and operating systems. The software used can be customized so that we can add more features in the future. 

Scope: Nowadays the main problem faced by internet users is an online advertisement. These ads will interrupt users surfing and streaming. Many software’s are available in the market to remove the ads but are limited in their functionality and users should pay for the application. Our idea of filtering the advertisements for a whole network with the use of open-source software’s and operating systems will be helpful for both small scale and big scale organisations. 

 Exclusions: All activities that are being made is issued by our team with precautions. Our team is using integrated third-party freeware to be plugged in with the network. Thus, there is no other person, or another party is enlisted on having their role in the project.