So I’m a bit new to the homenetworking and homelab situation but I have a Unifi DM-SE as my router and I’m trying to establish the best way to block ads at home and away.

So I am currently primarily using either extensions or content blocking apps on my devices to block ads but I’ve been looking into DNS based solutions lately.

I’ve looked into setting up PiHole and it looks pretty simple to do and I have a dedicated small computer with Proxmox that I use for things like Homebridge, Scrypted and I think could set it up easily on there. But it looks like it only works at home. A lot of people say you can set up a VPN but I’d rather not have to turn on and off my VPN on my phone whenever I leave home.

I also looked into Next DNS which seems also pretty easy to setup, but I couldn’t tell if it’s better to set this up per device or network wide via my router.

There’s also the extensions and content blocking apps which would be device specific.

Which is the fastest, performance wise, and easiest to interact with daily?

  • Frozen_GeckoBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    It’s actually quite easy to automatically let vpn turn on or off depending on whether you’re home or not.

    I personally use wireguard for this. On my wife’s iPhone there’s a setting in the wireguard app that automatically disconnects vpn when connected to specified ssid and reconnects vpn when disconnected from specified ssid. On my android I use the tasker app to get the same functionality. I used this guide to set it up: https://hndrk.blog/tutorial-wireguard-and-tasker/

    I haven’t set up dns ad blocking yet, but this is exactly the usecase I’ve come up with for this setup, that and always having our phones on home network for selfhosted services is great.

    Hope this is the solution that you’re looking for :)