Both AdGuard Home and Pi-hole are free and open source, and both do pretty well much the same as far as functionality goes. They can also both be installed natively or as a docker container image, and will run on Raspberry Pi’s or larger hardware.

The differences really come with AdGuard Home’s UI looking a touch more modern and less cluttered, and supposedly AdGuard Home has additional functionality already included, where that must be installed additionally for Pi-hole.

So I managed to get up and running quite quickly with AdGuard Home by following DB Tech’s video. One thing that tripped me up was that the container would not start, and reported a clash on port 53 (the DNS port). But one of the commenters on the video, Wesley O’Brien, suggested a solution which worked perfectly for me. I set my router’s DHCP server to provide the IP of my AdGuard Home server as the DNS, and now all devices throughout the home network are using it. Speed tests and website page loading appears unaffected (not slower, anyway).

See https://youtu.be/u9ylq5Gry_A

#technology #opensource #adguardhome #pihole #trackers

    • GadgeteerZA@lemmy.mlOP
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      3 years ago

      Well maybe but that product only covers Windows and Linux desktops so my Macbook, phone, TV, and other devices are not covered. By doing this upstream on my router I have the whole house’s devices covered by one product that I can manage globally. AdGuard is not a VPN product though, for that I have a product which I can enable per device or also on my router for the whole house.

        • GadgeteerZA@lemmy.mlOP
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          3 years ago

          It’s not just ads, but also trackers. Idea is to filter all devices across the house. So far about 20% of all my devices’ DNS queries are blocked ads and trackers (that’s on Linux, Android, iOS, etc). I notice as soon as I hit a news site, things go sky high on the blocking.

          But remember, a VPN is not going to filter out DNS ads and trackers - it just routes to a remote point and drops you out there. But yes this is a transparent on-site solution where we spend 98% of our time. Out and about is not covered by this.

    • xanaxagoras@lemmy.ml
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      3 years ago

      PiHole is a big part of how I do exactly those things.

      • Router acts as a wireguard client (for external VPN) and server (for home VPN).
      • LAN and home VPN DHCP services push pihole DNS server so client devices use it by default
      • I can change DNS servers temporarily on any given device if needed
      • Phone uses “always on VPN” feature on Android to connect to home VPN; computers can connect easily as well from anywhere
      • Router routes all LAN and home VPN non-local traffic across external VPN provider
      • PiHole uses external VPN provider’s DNS server for upstream DNS to prevent DNS leaks

      Granted it was difficult to get it all working. But really no maintenance since then.