So last night my firewall decided to say F you Reann and stopped working for no apparent reason. I called my ISP to see if it was anything on their end but it was a big nope. It was rather late at night and I do not have computers with monitors at my place so I thought I was SOL. I was frustrated that I could not do anything because I had the bright idea of deleting one of my two static IPs out of the router and than reboot it. I thought to calm my frustrations I would play some games on my ipad, and holly poop am I ever not used to all the ads in mobile games. Luckily my youtube ad blocking does not require anything else on my LAN so I put on some videos and went to bed. In the morning I remembered I had a ethernet to USB adapter and a USB A to c adapter so I would be able to fix it that way. Don’t know how many times I needed to fix the firewall because I broke the internet trying to fix my boo boos and a few times the firewall just said F you Reann I am not putting out. But it is now fixed and I can enjoy my moble games and web browsing mostly ad free!
So I had no pihole action on my LAN.
Like seriously how do people hand how many ads are shoved at you when you are using your devices?
I was on DuckDuckGo this morning trying to fix things and wow the ads, really made me miss searXNG.
Luckily I do not get spam, I spin up a new address for everything so I did not get those ads at least.
I run two synchonised Adguard instances on two different devices as DNS servers for the house (and for my work PC via vpn). on top of that I run local ad blockers on top of that. I dont care that my DNS ping times are a few ms longer. I dont want to be pestered, tracked, solicited or interrupted.
I cant stand the barrage of ads, especially on mobile websites, like its at the point where you want to read an article and you get two lines of text and the entire rest of the screen is ads you have to navigate.
Those few MS of latency are worth the recursive DNS and lack of ads for me too.
It’s been the best thing in my stack for a long time now.
I have 2 instances of pihole running in my LAN, I have wireguard on my firewall to get to those two ad blockers when I am away from home. I am so glad I was able to figure out how to get it back up and running without needing to redo all the work.
I have pihole do a lot more than just block ads; they also block a few different tlds (like .zip), they have different lists for different vLANs, and there are several different regex things I have in it.
They are not on the same pi, sure they are both docker images but they are on different pi’s