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

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

#201

Post by rahimnathwani »

hbcondo714 wrote: post #152

There are a few mostly positive comments here about NextDNS but I'll start a new comment since I'm thinking about switching away from NextDNS. Why? I'm on a Mac / Safari now and would like to enable their "Hide IP address from trackers" feature but if I do, then I start seeing advertisements on websites that would normally be blocked by NextDNS. So I have to uncheck this option and can't use Apple's feature. Overall,…

You're using one product that blocks ads and trackers, but then bypassing that with another product that deliberately provides access to ads and trackers, but via a third party.

What is the point of the latter?

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

#202

Post by briHass »

vin047 wrote: post #191
smarterhome wrote: post #81

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…

The real eye-opener is when you start redirecting DNS 53 requests to your own DNS server and block DoT/DoQ/DoH – so many devices/apps just trying to reach out to their hardcoded DNS servers for tracking/ad targeting.

Unsurprisingly, Google and Facebook IoT junk is the worst. They both hardcode their own DNS, and I've caught Google devices ignoring the DNS IP from DHCP (not the gateway) and attempting to resolve from the gateway (with external blocked)

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

#203

Post by briHass »

vladgur wrote: post #96

With a self-hosted DNS internally, how do you handle fallback? For example if the box with Adguard Home or pihole crashes, can you configure your router or your devices in a way that would instead go to say cloudflare or google DNS?

My router (Mikrotik Hex) redirects all DNS requests it receives to the Adguard server (with masquerade.) DHCP hands out the router for DNS.

A recurring script attempts to resolve a domain from Adguard every 30s, and if that fails, the NAT rules are disabled and the router would handle the DNS directly.

Downside to this approach is AG doesn't have client IPs, since they all come redirected by the router. I think DNS has a way to tag original IPs, but AG doesn't support it. I just use multiple DHCP configs to hand out AG directly to devices that are bad actors (and not critical), and critical stuff gets the method above.

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

#204

Post by sangnoir »

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…

> PiHole works 90% of the time, but when it did stop working, I'd have to spend a bit of time fixing it.

I don't know what problems you had with your Pi that resulted in 10% downtime, but that sort of hyperbole sounds a lot like shilling. Cases of SD card corruption are 99.9% due to the use of underpowered power supplies - just buy the official Raspberry Pi power supply if you can be bothered to search for a proper 2.5-3A USB power supply.

> At $20/year [...]

At $20 a year, I could buy a RPi Zero 2W and an SD card to keep as a spare every single year and have enough left over for a celebratory Sheetz sandwich. PiHole + WireGuard + $15 RPi Zero (once off) are unbeatable.

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

#205

Post by zymhan »

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…

> like being able to defer to my internal DNS for local private domain queries, etc.

PiHole supports Conditional forwarding

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

#206

Post by kelnos »

sangnoir wrote: post #204
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…

> PiHole works 90% of the time, but when it did stop working, I'd have to spend a bit of time fixing it. I don't know what problems you had with your Pi that resulted in 10% downtime, but that sort of hyperbole sounds a lot like shilling. Cases of SD card corruption are 99.9% due to the use of underpowered power supplies - just buy the official Raspberry Pi power supply if you can be bothered to search for a proper 2…

I think it's weird when people suggest that a self-hosted on-prem solution requires no maintenance and has so little downtime such that the time spent fixing issues doesn't matter.

I run a bunch of local services on RPis and a decade-old Mac Mini. I love having the control over things, but I don't pretend I don't spend a decent amount of time maintaining it. I only run things that don't need to be highly available, so something like Pi-Hole is off the table. The last thing I want is for our DNS to go out while I'm sleeping, and my partner has to wake me up because she has work to do.

You mention SD card corruption as the only reason why a RPi-based service might fail, but there are plenty of others: botched updates, random hardware failures, power supply issues, and likely other things I'm not thinking of.

And even if a Pi-Hole can keep three nines of uptime (I'm skeptical of this claim), many people will find significant value in giving someone else money so they don't even have to think about digging into fix a problem for the rare occasion it happens. Suggesting that a particular home-hosted solution is "unbeatable" is meaningless; "unbeatable" in this case is a subjective measure, and other people will value different things than you do.

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

#207

Post by hbcondo714 »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #201
hbcondo714 wrote: post #152

There are a few mostly positive comments here about NextDNS but I'll start a new comment since I'm thinking about switching away from NextDNS. Why? I'm on a Mac / Safari now and would like to enable their "Hide IP address from trackers" feature but if I do, then I start seeing advertisements on websites that would normally be blocked by NextDNS. So I have to uncheck this option and can't use Apple's feature. Overall,…

You're using one product that blocks ads and trackers, but then bypassing that with another product that deliberately provides access to ads and trackers, but via a third party. What is the point of the latter?

I subscribed + configured my router to use NextDNS years ago so ads + trackers are blocked on my IoT devices. More recently, I inherited a MacBook and now an iPhone and naturally enabled their built-in blocking capabilities. I think I assumed two blockers are better than one but now I just leave Apple's IP limiting features off and let NextDNS do its thing but it just feels weird to deliberately turn off a privacy feature.

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

#208

Post by omnicognate »

progbits wrote: post #159
zikduruqe wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have an automatic WireGuard VPN set up on my devices to VPN into my home network when I'm not connected to my SSID, so my local DNS still works remotely. Exact same setup for me also. I also run Tailscale since I have run into some remote networks that blocked wireguard's port.

How's the latency? I like the idea and might set that up but my residential ISP doesn't have great peering and latency isn't great. I wonder if that extra roundtrip would be noticable or not.

I do this from my phone with crummy copper ADSL at home that gets <20Mbps in the uplink and don't notice the difference between it being on and being off. YMMV of course, and all I'm doing is basic web browsing, occasional youtube videos and chat apps but it's fine for that.

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

#209

Post by kelnos »

qzx_pierri wrote: post #115
therealfiona wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too many false positives with Pi-Hole. I never felt comfortable putting my partner on the same vlan that it was serving DNS requests for fear that something would break for them when I was out of town, unable to get into the pi-hole and sort out the issue. I also had my banking app stop working one day. Never could get it working. Eventually I just got fed up with having to switch vlans or to mobile data to check my…

Couldn't you just monitor the query log and whitelist domains that were false positives?

"Just" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. That sounds like a lot of work, and it isn't always obvious which weirdly-spelled domain is causing the issue.

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

#210

Post by jostyee »

SparkyMcUnicorn wrote: post #94
upheaval7276 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wake…

It looks like cost is not comparable. ControlD pricing is per user and a router costs $5/month, but NextDNS is a flat $20/year. So ControlD would be significantly more than NextDNS for me personally.

StackSocial has a five year deal for $39.99 https://www.stacksocial.com/sales/control-d-5-year-subscript...
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