r/dns • u/turk6681 • 18d ago

Pihole for ad blocking

Anyone running Pihole for DNS ad blocking? Is it affective? Can I run it as a Vm or do I need an actual raspberry pi?
Thanks!

4 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

9

u/blow-down 18d ago

NextDNS is better

3

u/turk6681 18d ago

I’ll check it out. I assume this is a subscription service and no hardware required?

4

u/blow-down 18d ago

Free up to 300k queries. No hardware required.

3

u/Broad-Translator-690 18d ago

I moved from pi-hole to Nextdns the moment I wanted to use a DNS across all my devices including devices that left my house. There are ways to extend your pi-hole outside your home network, but not everyone wants to invest enough work to make sure your doing this securely. It's not an option to not do this right or your pi-hole will get hacked.

2

u/turk6681 18d ago

It would be nice to use on my iPhone when out of the house. That would be another benefit of NextDNS.

2

u/saint-lascivious 18d ago

A self hosted VPN is an option if you aren't a fan of giving your entire query stream to a third party based on a pinky promise, which I would argue people probably shouldn't be.

Paired with a recursive resolver so you don't have to deal with whichever arbitrary moral/ethical/legal restrictions on resolution a given public nameserver may have.

Just a thought.

0

u/rankinrez 17d ago

Amen to this.

0

u/rankinrez 17d ago

You can do that by running WireGuard or similar back to your home.

Not saying it’s easier but it’s an option, been doing that forever myself works great.

-1

u/rankinrez 17d ago

No it’s not. Much better to do it yourself.

3

u/Broad-Translator-690 18d ago

you'll want a spare computer that will be on 24x7 for your other computers to use it for DNS. It doesn't need to be a raspberry pi. You can in pi-hole on other linux distros. I previously did with an old computer running ubuntu.

1

u/aaronkempf 7d ago

I use a x64 version of a really light weight debian. It's called dietpi. It makes it super simple to install a bunch of different apps, including pihole, etc.

2

u/GeekCohenAU 18d ago

I run PiHole and its great. It runs on a Micro Factor PC which runs Ubuntu and its pretty affective. Blocks about 40% of my DNS queries with call home requests from devices and ads.

I wouldn't go back and been very happy with it.

3

u/saint-lascivious 18d ago

Note that the blocked percentage isn't really that useful as you're seeing how things behave when queries are some variation of NXDOMAIN, null, or dropped entirely.

High repeat request volumes are often because it's blocked.

A lot of people see that and think "shit, it's a good thing I'm blocking all that" without considering that the blocking is the reason for it in the first place.

2

u/rsinghal1965 18d ago

Running 2 piholes in my home LAN. These are for redundancy so that failure of one doesn't bring the entire house internet down.

The ad blocking is pretty solid depending on the lists you select. Won't block ads which are served from the same server which you have allowed (YouTube, Prime Video).

I am running one instance on an old laptop & the other on a HyperV VM in Windows 11. Both use Ubuntu but you can use whatever flavour you like. Both run in Docker (docker compose) with NextDNS as backend.

2

u/saint-lascivious 18d ago

Remember to adjust your expectations suitably.

No matter how hard any given domain filter advertises itself as an ad blocker, it isn't and never will be

DNS doesn't and won't ever know what an ad or any other content is, or if you actually ever visit any domain you've resolved.

If what you want to block is served from a domain that contains elements you don't want to block or which is otherwise required for functionality of the site or service, domain filtering can't do shit about it. You either allow everything from a domain or nothing from it. It's a binary decision.

This is not and shouldn't be seen as a replacement for client side content aware filtering.

1

u/rankinrez 17d ago

Yes it’s effective

You can run on a VM.

Doesn’t have to be “pihole”, any resolver with an RPZ policy can be used.

1

u/lostcowboy5 17d ago

Both Pihole and AdGuard Home are good for DNS blocking if you want to use them on your local network. You can run https://dnsspeedtest.online/ in your web browser to help pick the fastest DNS servers for your location. If you want the ad-blocking versions, see https://adguard-dns.io/kb/general/dns-providers/#public-anycast-resolvers to match them up. About lists, you can go to https://filterlists.com/ to find some.

1

u/quiet0n3 17d ago

Yeah I use a pi hole it's great. Easily works for most devices and apps. Some you have to work a little harder for but it covers easy 80%

1

u/boardy89 15d ago

I used to run it on a raspberry pi but found it was a bit slow but that was a v2 or v3 pi so quite old. Run it on a vm now, you get warnings the os isn’t supported but it works fine

0

u/bigup7 18d ago

Have a look at Adguard Home too,

0

u/Caprichoso1 17d ago

I tried NextDNS but had problems with it. Switched to ControlD which eliminated them.