Pi-Hole or something else for network ad blocking?

plenipotentprotogod@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 165 points –

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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Adguard-home is way better than pi-hole imo

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

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

Encryption, UI, probably a little bit more serious development

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

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/

Hold on, this is not the same encryption

The encryption i was talking about is the encryption of your dns server

The article you sent is talking about upstream dns server encryption

The encryption i was talking about is the encryption of your dns server

You mean encryption between the client and your DNS server, on your local network?

You can do it on your local network, but this won't make much sense

I mean encryption between your phone or laptop outside of your house, and your dns server at your house

That's a bunch of extra manual work though - both the initial setup, plus keeping the extra software packages up-to-date. With AdGuard Home, it's already configured to use DoH by default.

That's cool for certain applications but on my home network should I really be super concerned about DNS encryption?

Not within the network, but translating regular dns to DoH before heading out to WAN keeps your browsing a little bit more private from your isp. Marginal, but it is a difference.

It's not just a little bit more private... It's a lot more private. Some ISPs have been known to build advertising profiles using DNS data. It's trivial for them to see all DNS lookups and even modify the responses, since it's both unencrypted and unauthenticated by default.

Probably not, but anyway it's pretty cool to have an option to do this kind of stuff

You can set up this dns on your phone, laptop, without a need of vpn (although vpns are cool, especially tailscale)

But, are you always connected to the vpn? Or even to connect to the vpn itself you probably need dns, why would not use your own

As an AdGuard home user for more than a few years, I switched back to Pihole because it wasn’t really any better. It was also easier to pair pihole with Unbound.

Plus it's easy to run multiple AdGuard Home servers and keep them in sync using https://github.com/bakito/adguardhome-sync

Oh, oh, oh, gimme that!!

First time i hear about something like that, i'm going to install it asap

It works well! I have one AdGuardHome instance running on my home server and one running on a Raspberry Pi, both using Docker. Having two prevents the internet from breaking in case I have to shut down one of them for some reason.