this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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I've been aware of pi-hole for a while now, but never bothered with it because I do most web browsing on a laptop where browser extensions like uBlock origin are good enough. However, with multiple streaming services starting to insert adds into my paid subscriptions, I'm looking to upgrade to a network blocker that will also cover the apps on my smart TV.

I run most of my self hosted services on a proxmox server, so I'd like something that'll run as an LXC container or a VM. I'm also vaguely aware that various competing applications have come out since pi-hole first gained popularity. Is pi-hole still the best thing going, or are there better options?

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 9 months ago

pihole is mature and very functional. i jumped in last summer, no regrets.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 9 months ago

AdGuard Home and blocky are other popular options. I switched over to AdGuard Home a while back because it supported DNS over HTTPS although I'm not sure if that's still a relevant reason. I run AGH as a docker container but it is easy to run in a LXC or VM. There's also a tool to sync configs if you need multiple instances. Notice: AGH block lists are formatted like uBlock Origin lists so you will not be able to use PiHole style lists.

DNS based ad blockers won't work when ads are served from the same place as the content. Which is why DNS based ad blockers don't work against Twitch or YouTube. So YMMV.

If you're looking to block interface ads and select streaming service ads there are block lists available like this one. The game with smart TVs is blocking the ads breaks the TV a little because sometimes it calls back to the same servers for updates and misc info like weather.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago (8 children)

Pi-hole is great, but unfortunately ads in YouTube or other streaming services is not one of the things it blocks.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
DNS Domain Name Service/System
HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
HTTPS HTTP over SSL
IP Internet Protocol
IoT Internet of Things for device controllers
LXC Linux Containers
PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole)
SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
VPN Virtual Private Network

7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 5 acronyms.

[Thread #431 for this sub, first seen 15th Jan 2024, 23:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (2 children)

NextDNS.

Also, be wary of relying on anything blocking ads on streaming services this way. They will likely serve them within the video stream, so not network-blockable.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (5 children)

NextDNS caps your queries per month on the free account. ControlD doesn't and you can pick a various mix of their public DNS resolvers. You don't necessarily get the granular control with doing it this way for free that you can get with NextDNS though.

If you do check out these, make sure you click the Secure Resolvers if you'd prefer for DLS/DOQ/DNS over HTTPS instead of Legacy.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Adguard-home is way better than pi-hole imo

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Pihole user for more than 5 years,.can confirm that it is indeed better, made the switch few months ago

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

What makes adguard home better than pihole? Genuinely curious, I'm running pihole now and have been for a couple of years without issues.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

What makes it better other than the UI? I'm weary of using it because it is developed by Russian developers.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (5 children)

Encryption, UI, probably a little bit more serious development

But encryption is a big thing, DoT, DoH, Quic. And soon they will have ECH

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Just wanted to chime in and say that with a pihole you can also have encryption if you point to a local resolver like cloudflared or unbound.

My pihole forwards everything to a cloudflared service running on 127.0.0.1:5353 to encrypt all my outgoing DNS queries, it was really easy to setup: https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns/cloudflared/

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

I use both. Pi-hole running in a docker container on one of my home servers which my gateway is configured to assign as the default DNS for all clients, and uBlock Origin on all my browsers to catch everything else.

Pihole is pretty good at catching ads on platforms that are not suited to browser based blockers (IoT devices, streaming boxes etc) but it isn't perfect and is best used in conjunction with another solution.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Pi-Hole’s great. Got my primary instance on a Pi 4 and three secondaries (one per vlan) on LXCs. Works so well it feels weird seeing ads when I’m not at home, I’m actually considering using Tailscale to route all my queries through my home connection.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

I second that, turns out 90% of the queries on my network come from my Libratone speakers and they seem to desperately try and reach China (.com.cn)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I do this and it works great. Ad block on all my devices regardless of proprietary sandboxes. I also use Syncthing over my tailnet IP addresses so that traffic never leaves my “grounds”. I’m slowly building out a whole suite of services I host only within my tailnet, jellyfin, calibre, invidious, it been a great learning experience. I’m about to set up a proper home lab, finally moving everything off an old laptop.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

If you are more into a full DNS solution that can also block Technitium DNS is a reasonable choice. It is fairly userfriendly, can be run in an LXC easily (I am doing exactly that), able to use multiple block lists in any combination you want, can be controlled by an API, is regularly updated,etc.

I couldn't be happier with it, even though the learning curve is somewhat steep, when you are new to DNS. It is a fully fledged DNS server after all.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Adguard home is like pihole, but has built in encrypted DNS options. For easy mode NextDNS.

They pretty much all have the same block lists to choose from.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

I use 2 cloudflare containers that the pihole points to. That gives me DNS over https but it's more of a mission to set up.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (9 children)

I run pihole on proxomox, and also opnsense in the same box. Then you can forward all port 53 traffic to your pihole. Some devices have hard-coded DNS that will bypass the DHCP DNS.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

DNS based ad blocking does not block video ads served by streaming services. You'll need a modified client specific to the service you want to block ads for to achieve that.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

I am very happy with Blocky https://github.com/0xERR0R/blocky

No UI, just a simply config file if that is your thing.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (4 children)

I went with a pi running pi-hole. I got it as a project where the tool is the project. But, it's essential infrastructure now and I don't want to mess with it incase I break it. I'm an idiot with a poor history with pi guides so far, so I will break it. It's running the adblock fine, I assume it's doing the tracking and malware blocking fine too.

Sadly, that's where I leave the project for now, I had intended to give it a HDD and some... other... software but I really don't want to break it. I tried convincing the better half that I obviously need to N+1 but she wisely did not see reason.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I set up pihole a few months ago. I added a few dozen of the highest recommended block lists, but I wasn't impressed at all. It didn't seem very effective at blocking ads in both real world tests and tests that I found online specifically for testing your adblocker.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (6 children)

The best test I have is my wife complaining, that ads in Google results cannot be opened. It seems to work flawlessly for me 😂

On a more serious note, what tests are these? The thing is, the ad domain is either in the blocklist or not. Ads inside apps are hard to block (I even have adaway on my android, and some slip through as eg Instagram reuses the backend domains/endpoints for ad delivery).

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

There’s nothing really bad with PiHole but I moved from it to AdGuard, both on proxmox. The UI brought me in, makes management a bit easier. It also supports DoH right out of the box.

Try em both. See what you think.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I ran Pi-hole for years. Switched to adguardhome running on 2 servers (primary and secondary) with AGH sync keeping the two instances identical. I like the UI better, dns rewrites, and the ability to simply block services entirely with a single click.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I love pihole, for my family it is better as it helps on all the devices. Being able to block malware and tracking is nice too

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Pfblockerng on pfsense is very powerful.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Yes, been running one for many years and it’s great.

Shoutout to the PiHole team!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I use knot-resolver with the big block list from https://oisd.nl/ and it works great.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

One thing I've found is it's good at blocking ads via mobile gaming. The downside is if those ads return rewards in-game.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

https://lemmy.world/post/10327372

This dude uses mini PCs for pi type tasks.

Might be easier to get a hold of.

Good luck OP

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