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AdGuard Home: Network-wide ad- and tracker-blocking DNS server

github.com

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Re: AdGuard Home: Network-wide ad- and tracker-blocking DNS server

#81

Post by smarterhome »

AdGuard Home is amazing! I used PiHole for a time but did run into small issues quite at lot. Mind you nothing serious but things like these are only really useful if they just work. Adguard Home works without any issues on my Pi setup via docker-compose [1] and it even runs on a second Pi as backup using a cool container called adguardhome-sync [2] to keep their configurations in sync. I am not seeing any ads in my network anymore and it is quite interesting to see how many tracking/ad requests are sent by some devices...

1 - https://thesmarthomejourney.com/2021/05/24/adguard-pihole-dn...

2 - https://thesmarthomejourney.com/2023/02/12/adguardhome-sync-...

Re: AdGuard Home: Network-wide ad- and tracker-blocking DNS server

#82

Post by ssklash »

air7 wrote: post #79
drewg123 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love NextDNS. The one (fairly huge) issue that I have is that it cannot handle captive portals when its enabled on my iPhone. So if I'm joining the wifi on a plane, etc, I need to remember to turn it off. This means that I cannot recommend it to my non-technical friends.

A general trick for bringing up the captive portal manually is to browse to a non ssl url such as http://example.com The portal would unapologeticly mitm the server response with a redirect to the portal login page. The domain needs to exist (to pass DNS) and not have HSTS, but otherwise any address will do.

http://neverssl.com/ is my go-to for this.

Re: AdGuard Home: Network-wide ad- and tracker-blocking DNS server

#83

Post by upheaval7276 »

JaggedJax wrote: post #78
JadoJodo wrote: post #3

I ran a competing project[0] on my home network for a few years before I discovered NextDNS[1]. What I lost in performance (requests don't leave my house) I gained in portability: ALL my devices can take advantage – at home and away – and time-saved. PiHole works 90% of the time, but when it did stop working, I'd have to spend a bit of time fixing it. At $20/year, I simply couldn't compete with NextDNS. Note: This is…

I've used ControlD [ https://controld.com/ ] for this and liked it. Does anyone know how NextDNS compares to it? ControlD has worked well for me, outside a few UI complaints I have with their site. I do have some concerns with trust as I don't know much about ControlD, and I'd rather use the most trusted service for this.

I've been a NextDNS user for years now, and am trying out ControlD (last week) before I commit to switching. NextDNS development seems to have stalled and there are a number of conveniences missing, such as being able to label allowlist entries (ControlD supports this). Also, running the NextDNS app on a device that use a different profile then the one on my home router results in constant issues when the device wakes from sleep (not able to resolve domains for a noticeable amount of time on wake). NextDNS claims this is an Apple issue, but I don't think that's entirely true. Certainly not a problem for other similar services.

I'm seeing ControlD as much more feature-rich and the service is evolving faster. I also personally like the UI a bit more vs NextDNS. Prices are comparable.

Re: AdGuard Home: Network-wide ad- and tracker-blocking DNS server

#84

Post by verelo »

stranded22 wrote: post #76
JadoJodo wrote: post #3

I ran a competing project[0] on my home network for a few years before I discovered NextDNS[1]. What I lost in performance (requests don't leave my house) I gained in portability: ALL my devices can take advantage – at home and away – and time-saved. PiHole works 90% of the time, but when it did stop working, I'd have to spend a bit of time fixing it. At $20/year, I simply couldn't compete with NextDNS. Note: This is…

I love nextdns - pihole was fine but required admin, and I also had challenges vpn’ing in to use it out side of home. Whereas nextdns is simple to use, and effective.

No idea how I have been living under a rock. I was using Google dns forever, but just switched my router over to next! This looks amazing, and great to see so many people using it with positive feedback.

Re: AdGuard Home: Network-wide ad- and tracker-blocking DNS server

#85

Post by amelius »

How can this possibly work?

I don't know much about how adtech works, but if I were Google I'd provide ad blocking detection to all of my clients. And it should be pretty simple to detect if parts of the network that are essential to my ads are being blocked.

Re: AdGuard Home: Network-wide ad- and tracker-blocking DNS server

#87

Post by andix »

madduci wrote: post #14
zukzuk wrote: post #2

I looked at Pi-hole recently but went with AdGuard Home. Nicer UI and nicer everything by all appearances. There's also a surprising amount of customization for something this slick, like being able to defer to my internal DNS for local private domain queries, etc. I'm not entirely sure why AdGuard is giving this away, and maybe I should look into that, but seemed like a relatively low-risk decision to go with this f…

They can expand their user base and when they have acquired a certain amount of people, switch to a licensed model?

The main repo is GPLv3: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome

They already have many other commercials products and I guess also the default filter rules are very good because of their experience in the domain.

But I think you can use it completely without the AdGuard servers and use other filter list sources.

Re: AdGuard Home: Network-wide ad- and tracker-blocking DNS server

#88

Post by idatum »

JadoJodo wrote: post #3

I ran a competing project[0] on my home network for a few years before I discovered NextDNS[1]. What I lost in performance (requests don't leave my house) I gained in portability: ALL my devices can take advantage – at home and away – and time-saved. PiHole works 90% of the time, but when it did stop working, I'd have to spend a bit of time fixing it. At $20/year, I simply couldn't compete with NextDNS. Note: This is…

I ran Pi-hole along with my OpenBSD router running unbound for some period. Then I realized I can download the same entries used for Pi-hole, AdGuard, uBlock, etc. I created a simple script that generates an unbound configuration that I can include in my unbound.conf file.

One advantage over Pi-hole I noticed is I can return NXDOMAIN which makes more sense to me. I didn't see how I had that option with Pi-hole.

I just checked, and the generated unbound configuration comes in at 218000 lines, so takes a moment on my Celeron J3060 class router when loading unbound.

Re: AdGuard Home: Network-wide ad- and tracker-blocking DNS server

#89

Post by hackeman300 »

oceanplexian wrote: post #80
i2shar wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven’t used NextDNS but have used PiHole and currently running AdGuard Home. But if you are paying $20/year just for DNS encryption/blocking, you may consider upgrading to Mullvad which gives you DNS Ad blocking but also IP anonymity, tunneling etc.

Except all of these third party VPN and DNS type services are literally NSA honeypots and privacy nightmares. I get that you have to do DNS lookups somewhere, but I'm not going to make it ridiculously trivial for a bad actor to scoop up all that data conveniently in a central location.

Mullvad is an NSA honeypot? Got any sources on that?

Re: AdGuard Home: Network-wide ad- and tracker-blocking DNS server

#90

Post by andix »

zukzuk wrote: post #2

I looked at Pi-hole recently but went with AdGuard Home. Nicer UI and nicer everything by all appearances. There's also a surprising amount of customization for something this slick, like being able to defer to my internal DNS for local private domain queries, etc. I'm not entirely sure why AdGuard is giving this away, and maybe I should look into that, but seemed like a relatively low-risk decision to go with this f…

About the give-away-for-free aspect I was also wondering. Do they maybe configure their dns servers as default upstream and hope many people keep the defaults? DNS is one of the best technologies to do data mining and sell the data. I guess it's also why all those easy to remember dns servers like 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1 exist. Google and Cloudflare for sure don't do it just to be nice.

Disclaimer: adguard claims not to sell any customer data.

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