So I’m a bit new to the homenetworking and homelab situation but I have a Unifi DM-SE as my router and I’m trying to establish the best way to block ads at home and away.
So I am currently primarily using either extensions or content blocking apps on my devices to block ads but I’ve been looking into DNS based solutions lately.
I’ve looked into setting up PiHole and it looks pretty simple to do and I have a dedicated small computer with Proxmox that I use for things like Homebridge, Scrypted and I think could set it up easily on there. But it looks like it only works at home. A lot of people say you can set up a VPN but I’d rather not have to turn on and off my VPN on my phone whenever I leave home.
I also looked into Next DNS which seems also pretty easy to setup, but I couldn’t tell if it’s better to set this up per device or network wide via my router.
There’s also the extensions and content blocking apps which would be device specific.
Which is the fastest, performance wise, and easiest to interact with daily?
Pihole v6 Beta (and I have a fallback to v5). Runs together with unbound in recoursive mode. Super slick and fast!
If you’re on android you can use tasker to automatically connect to VPN when not at home
uBlock origin + Pihole. uBlock covers just about everything on your PC but I mainly use Pihole for mobile devices and as a “catch all net”
I’m running unbound. I have a cronjob (bash+python) that downloads StevenBlack’s blacklist (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts), turns it into an unbound config file, and restarts unbound.
Happy to provide a copy if anyone is interested.
Technitium! Soo many features, runs on just about anything. Amazing integration with DHCP. Way easy to set up.
It’s actually quite easy to automatically let vpn turn on or off depending on whether you’re home or not.
I personally use wireguard for this. On my wife’s iPhone there’s a setting in the wireguard app that automatically disconnects vpn when connected to specified ssid and reconnects vpn when disconnected from specified ssid. On my android I use the tasker app to get the same functionality. I used this guide to set it up: https://hndrk.blog/tutorial-wireguard-and-tasker/
I haven’t set up dns ad blocking yet, but this is exactly the usecase I’ve come up with for this setup, that and always having our phones on home network for selfhosted services is great.
Hope this is the solution that you’re looking for :)
adguard+ublock origin pretty much does it for me.
Adguard home
Cellular is a completely different network so their is no solution unless you owned a cell tower and did it from that litterly impossible by design for cellular stick to extensions!!! I wouldn’t vpn just for no ads but would use a local ad blocker on my network
If it’s DNS based adblocking, like PiHole or pfBlockerNG, you can do split tunnel VPN, no need to route the entire traffic, just the DNS
NextDNS works on cellular, since you install the config on the phone itself. Works brilliantly, anywhere I travel.
This, is it what we’ve all need or is their a Caveat
I look after two AdGuard Home installations.
One is local, running on a super-tiny PC (Intel Atom x5, 4 GB RAM, 64 GB eMMC, Debian 12, and I see no reason why AGH wouldn’t run just as well on a 2 / 32 GB version of that PC). The average handling time for a DNS request is 30 ms. You could easily do something similar in a Proxmox container, give it a local IP address, and have you router use it as the DNS server instead of whatever it’s using now.
The other is in the cloud, running on a virtual server with 1 GB RAM. The average handling time for a DNS request is 10 ms.
Made an entire video about how to do this with your pihole and unbound.
Ditched pihole and went with NextDNS running natively on my UDM Pro. Performance is much improved.
I can’t use any of this stuff, my ISP router is so shit that changing the DNS to Cloudflare or Google’s breaks my internet =|
I have multiple layers of ad blocking.
- Pihole for DNS
- Firefox w/uBlock Origin & SponsorBlock (YouTube) on every PC
- Brave browser on iPhones.
- SmartTubeNext (YouTube) on Chromecast
- All of my mobile devices are connected by VPN to utilize Pihole when I’m not home