Nowadays the internet is pretty much unusable without ad blockers/dns sinkholes
Calling it ad blocking undersells it. The ad network is the delivery path in that report, so blocking at DNS is a security layer, not tidiness. The thing I’m building goes a step further: it holds tracker connections open instead of refusing them, so they waste their own time instead of retrying instantly. Has anyone tried tarpitting at home? I’m curious whether it broke smart TVs or apps that phone home hard.
The problem with tarpitting is that apps will try to download the ads before showing you the content, and you will be more annoyed than before
DNS blockers work so why would I need your solution? I dont care if the sites try to reconnect cause the connection wont work nonetheless
Whats with that title? It doesn’t say the word DNS, Sink, self or host in the article…
Whys it important to self host? I use ControlD and NextDNS and both have been great.
Unbound on OPNsense ftw
Absolutely. Remember to enable a cron job in the OpnSense - System > Settings > cron to update the Blocklists. Otherwise you are likely out of date.
Just moved to an OPNsense network. Setting up unbound was so nice and simple. Much preferred over pihole.
Agreed. I used pihole initially when I was first learning networking, but when I got a dedicated machine and installed OPNsense, I learned how much easier so many things can be.
The downside is OPNsense is it’s information light, and a bit inscrutable lol I’m having an issue with my WAN dhcp going offline, seems to be happening on a cadence. My modem is fine, connection is valid. Rebooting the OPNsense box fixes it. Losing my mind a bit but I’ll figure it out 🙃
Try setting a tunable of:
net.link.ether.inet.max_age = 540
By default FreeBSD sets a 20 minute ARP maximum age while many ONT’s set a 9 minute maximum age. This will show up as performance issues initially then cause other issues.
Also Realtek NIC’s are notorious for issues with FreeBSD, so if you are using one replacing it with an Intel one is highly recommended.
I believe it was the realtek NIC and some settings offloading to the hardware I set during troubleshooting. Installed the Realtek driver in the plugins and changed those settings and so far no instability! Thank you for the tunable suggestion though I will also be checking that out!
No problem.
Be sure to set a cron job for updating the DNS Blocklists, running zcrubs, smart tests, and trim if you are using a ssd.
I am working on a way to do snapshots for the system as well for super simple restores that are automatically created. Before an update you WILL want to have a snapshot available. Once snapshots are automated I will probably start doing automatic updates. It basically creates a system similar to how an immutable OS works, if something goofs you can simply roll back to a previous working state and pause updates. I previously had a script I setup via a cron job but the system removed the job during an update.
These are huge! Thank you for the suggestions I will get to implementing all of these. The only thing I’ve done so far similar to what’s in this list is backing up to my git repo, which is very nice. Every setting change gets committed. Is that different than snapshotting?
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I have a finally tuned pihole that offers different blocking for different vLANs on my home network and VPNs, I would not trust a third party for ad blocking. However you do you.
I was watching SomeOrdanryGamers video on this and his pihole did not block all the ads on an ad infected site, but mine could. I have used canyoublockit many times to stress test my system, wish there was something newer though.
Trust it, no.
Is it better than nothing, yes.
Listen, some folks can afford to build and dedicate time and resources to making a pi-hole for their network.
Those who can’t need to know there are alternatives, some are better than others, I’m just sharing information.
I meant no shade, I know it takes a lot of work to do everything I have done for security/ad blocking.
Thanks for the tip. I can’t find pricing on the NextDNS site. Is it free?
Don’t think I have the spoons for things like PiHole.
Edit: found it via web search https://nextdns.io/pricing
It’s free for a limited number of queries per month. Generally enough for one device (depending on personal usage, obviously). Edit: It’ll still function as DNS after that limit, you just won’t get ad blocking and whatnot.
Mullvad has a free ad-blocking DNS you can use, too. I recommend the “base” version: https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls
Thanks very much for the explanation. I’ve installed NextDNS in my phone now and will do other devices as I get to them.
I don’t recommend Mullvad, and I appeal to everyone to stop recommending them. The monies they receive directly funds fascism and is responsible for serious harm to society and erosion of democracy.
FYI you can point your home router to NextDNS and quickly get whole-house coverage that way. This is good for things like smart tvs, Roku/android boxes, kindles etc.
Installing directly on your phone & laptop is best for devices that will travel outside of your home network.
Oh, that’s fantastic advice. Thank you!
Please know this service will be ending next month.
Well crud. Thanks for the heads-up. First I’ve heard.
Sounds like Quad9 doesn’t actually do ad blocking, so that’s not much of a replacement.
Quad9 is a crap choice though 😥
Why?
It was founded by the Manhattan district attorney and the city of London police force (https://globalcyberalliance.org/history/) and IBM. I know that they say they are now reincorporated as a nonprofit in Switzerland but I find it suspicious that they don’t mention their history on their webpage, the Wikipedia entry doesn’t have a history section and the Global Cyber Alliance doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry either.
I might be paranoid but all this seems weird to me and I don’t trust them.
I like technitium. Way better than pi hole.
In what way(s)?
It’s a more complete dns server. You can more easily do dns over https, set up zones, and custom dns entries are a lot easier imo.
In summary it’s more focused on being dns, the ad blocking is a feature on top. You also don’t have to manually configure unbound for recursive dns like you do pi hole. Etc etc
Oh. I guess if you just want dead simple ad blocking, pi hole is still the way
I’d prefer Adguard Home. Does the same thing but also supports encrypted DoT/DoQ/DoH upstreams. And the UI looks a bit neater for me
AdGuard looks like a paid SaaS service though? No way am I paying for someone else running a device on my network, no friggin way
AdGuard Home is free. I’m running 2 redundant docker containers on separate hosts with adguard sync all for free.
Yup, I have it installed in my OPNSense and together they make a fucking fortress
Yeah but what you will eventually find, if reliability matters at all to you, is that the pihole isn’t the best for this. For one, many run on an SD card, which isn’t really stable long-term (I started here and had to fix it due to SD card corruption quite a few times). Second, you don’t have a backup. DNS not running when your machines depend on it equals an immediate outage across ALL devices (as long as you have it configured at your router level, which you should be doing, right?).
Technitium (and others) solve this problem gracefully.
I started with pihole (ad blocking) and unbound (recursive DNS), and that was a pain to set up properly.
Moved do technitium (which offers all of these in one package) plus the ability to natively cluster a second instance (so you have a backup load balanced instance for this critical service)
The best part is that setting it up if you have an old laptop or desktop running docker is incredibly simple. I had two nodes up and running clustered in less than 15 minutes. Took less time than setting up one pihole.
If you don’t have docker it may take more time, but that’s the slippery slope of setting up a homelab and running services like this.
My Pi hole has been up and solid for about a decade now, so not sure “isn’t really stable long term” is landing
Thank you for the in-depth explanation, Technitium sounds really involved. I just plunked down a pi hole, turned it on, and it’s been working for years and years. I’ll keep this in mind though if I ever want to drive myself nuts with networking
Good for you, many don’t have the same experience. Technitium is easier to set up in my experience, but you do you if it works for you. That’s the benefit of having free choices.
Just to be clear, I’m not trying to sell you or anyone on technitium over pihole or pihole+unbound, they’re all free and I don’t work for them or anything. However, as someone that has gone through this journey with all of them, I’ll never go back to pihole, especially with the features technitium has and the importance of DNS to my home lab plus the incredible ease of setup.
No backup with PiHole?
PiHole can run redundant if you want. Does Technitium do this differently? Or more easily?
Technitium does this incredibly easily. I fiddled with pihole and unbound for so long to get them to coexist properly, and pihole alone before that. The pihole part was easy although unreliable on a raspberry pi due to the sd card. It was better once I added an ssd to the pi, but it didn’t have recursive DNS. Adding unbound and getting them configured properly and coexisting properly wasn’t an easy task. Technitium has all of this in one package and was trivial to set up one or more clustered nodes. You don’t need anything to ensure they both work together, the clustering feature does this incredibly easily. One goes down? No prob, I see a discord alert from uptime kuma letting me know. When it comes back up cluster mgmt syncs everything and they load balance again.
My current setup has an uptime of 210 days, and likely would be longer if it weren’t for a power outage.
It really is so simple, I’d suggest everyone try it out. You can always change it back if you don’t like it. And, like the pihole, you can load curated block lists.
If you just want simple ad blocking you don’t actually need pi hole for it’s web interface you don’t ever look at once it runs. Unbound alone can do the job with minimal configuration.
Nowadays I even changed my setup to dnsproxy, which doesn’t even need any config. It’s just a handful parameters when you start it. And it does all the filtering for my home network as well as providing DoH access for when I’m not at home and connected from somewhere else.
An ONT failure has me fiddling with my network this weekend and I might do this. Pihole is okay but having more power would be great.
The main way is it has a built in recursive DNS server so you don’t have to duct tape Pi Hole and Ubound together
I never understood pihole in the first place. It’s just a fancy web interface you do never look at if the thing does its job quietly in the background. And unbound alone is perfectly able to use blocklists with one line of configuration (and an onliner script to convert the common lists into the right format).
Because you have to mess with it all the time. It’s easier to get in and get out to make changes with the nice interface. It’d be different if it was set it and forget it but realistically it’s not.
It literally is a cron job or systemd timer to load an updated blocklist from time to time and I haven’t looked at it for years (well… other an changing a path when I switched from unbound to dnsproxy, because that one is even simpler, doesn’t even need a config other than a few parameters at startup and can provide DoH, DoT and/or DoQ access for when I’m not at home)
Nah it’s more like all the sites and services that used blocked links that you have to add to the whitelist or in some cases be able to turn the protection off and on. It’s a regular occurrence for me
This is the way
Love blocky. Seems like it flies under the radar.
Is Adguard Home still a good option for this kind of thing?
Yes, from what I understand. They are using ad services from the big ad companies, and because capitalism sucks they are completely fine with selling the spots.
if you do not have a system to VPN into your home I would suggest get a firewall (preferably one you can install openWRT of opnSense on) and VPN into your LAN when away from home.
My TPlink omada router has Wireguard built in, so I use WG tunnels on my mobile devices to tunnel home where my PiHole (soon to be replaced by Technitium) blocks ads and malicious content.
My flint2, came with OpenWRT, but I installed a vanilla OpenWRT onto it it handles my many different wifi APs, all my vLANs, and a couple VPNs. I have a finally tuned pihole setup, I could not imagine changing it, I was watching this video by SomOrdinaryGamer so I went to the site he made an example of and I got no ads with just my pihole.
