Recently saw a post regarding pi-hole, and I am considering to try it out. I am wondering if it would fit my usecase, so I want to ask about specifically what it solves.
I heard pi-hole blocks ads at DNS resolution level, so it does not block e.g. youtube ads. For me and my family who mostly watch youtube with handful of blog surfing, what value would it bring? Most blogs do not seem to contain much ads, so I am not sure ad-blocking helps much there.
Given the praise pi-hole is getting, I guess there are more to it than limited blocking of ads. I would love to learn more about this topic, as I am blind on the networking stuff. Thanks in advance!
I have AdguardHome on my RPi4 (4GB) model, and it works perfectly fine. I have also hosted Pi-Hole v.5 and even their recent Pi-Hole v6 they just released on it and have even at times run TechnitiumDNS on it. Not all at once of course, but I wanted to let you know you can host any of these on a RPi without issues.
One think you get with the Pi-hole is you can set up a DNS entry where you could for example, set up “laptop” and any time you want to access it or ping it, anywhere on your network, you can simply just enter in http://laptop or ping laptop. With both AdguardHome and Technitium, you need to append the .local or .internal or .home subdomain to make it work. It’s not really an issue for me since I just modify my hosts file on my computer to do the same thing, but is sort of cool when you use a system on the network to just go to http://homepage to reach your dashboard like Homarr or Flame on your phone where you can’t adjust the hosts file as easily.
TechnitiumDNS is what you want if you are wanting to dive deep into your world of DNS configurations, from there, I was able to set up a redirect to my PXE boot server so when devices would grab their IP from the DHCP server, if they queried for a boot device, it would tell the device where to boot from. I’m pretty sure you can do that with PiHole, but I may be wrong. Additionally, with TechntiumDNS, I was able to set up an adblock for my IoT’s VLAN network. without the need to add a second one to the network. As far as I can tell, with the other solutions, this is not as easy to do.
If you are wanting to determine which would be easier to run, I would say AdguardHome for the easiest. Next in line is PiHole v6. and lastly TechnitiumDNS if you really want to dive into the complexities. It is a good business class DNS server. The reason I’m on AdGuardHome right now is for as others stated simplicity. TechnitiumDNS is overkill for my home network, PiHole V6 took forever for them to release, but was a major re-write and if you want to set up your DHCP static mapping like I do, they kneecapped the entry a bit. It’s still there, but not as easy to find and more of a thing like (I don’t recall the order it goes on) MAC;IP;HOSTNAME or something like that instead of the easier method of just clicking in a row and entering those data points one per field like AdGuardHome, and TechnitiumDNS do. Pihole V5 included.
My Network pretty much has 3 layers of DNS filtering active, The first layer is on my router which has built in adblock (FreshTomato), then AdGuardHome, and finally, browser level blocking. I don’t get Youtube Ads on my computers, but on the phones and TV I do. In the browser, I use U-Block Origin which is in the cat and mouse game with Youtube ad-blocking.