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?
uBlock origin + Pihole. uBlock covers just about everything on your PC but I mainly use Pihole for mobile devices and as a “catch all net”
To be honest the advertisers have won this battle as far as I’m concerned but hear me out. It’s the “please turn off your ad blocker and support this site” pop-ups got more annoying than the ads. Using a VPN just means I don’t get personalized ads, just random ones.
I run everything through a local install of Charles Proxy (though Proxyman or Sqid on Linux can do the same). This lets me see all of my traffic and see ssl traffic in plane text and I use this all day for debugging.
Couple Advantages to using a Proxy instead of a blocker:
- I can black list some urls that are annoying - including ads but web pages don’t see that as adblocking so no p
- I can use the re-write tool if I’m getting sick of hearing about someone on the news all of the time.
- I connect other devices on my wifi to it like my android (for above and debugging apps)
- They can act as a cache with makes things faster though not a real issue these days with GPS internet.
- There are blacklist collections peaple socialize
I’ve allway wanted the advantages of a proxy but I’ve had a hard time picking hardware, lmk
I have multiple layers of ad blocking.
- Pihole for DNS
- Firefox w/uBlock Origin & SponsorBlock (YouTube) on every PC
- Brave browser on iPhones.
- SmartTubeNext (YouTube) on Chromecast
- All of my mobile devices are connected by VPN to utilize Pihole when I’m not home
Made an entire video about how to do this with your pihole and unbound.
I just use basic DNS ad/scam/spam/etc-blocking, via technetium.
I mostly relays on ublock/sponsorblock, as they are much more effective, and tend to “break” less of the internet.
DNS block-lists tend to do a nuke-from-orbit approach, while not being nearly as effective as you would want. (For example- its not going to effectively hide most youtube ads, facebook ads, etc.), while ublock, is extremely effective at the task.
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 :)
Cellular is a completely different network so their is no solution unless you owned a cell tower and did it from that litterly impossible by design for cellular stick to extensions!!! I wouldn’t vpn just for no ads but would use a local ad blocker on my network