Pi-Hole vs. AdGuard Home

[Stephen]

I've been toying with the idea of setting up Pi-Hole or AdGuard Home on my network, but just have never gotten around to doing it. Finally bought a Raspberry Pi today, so I'm committed now.

I'm leaning towards AdGuard Home just because of the additional parental controls and filtering options that are available right out of the box. I know you can add all that in to Pi-Hole, but its not default. That said, Pi-Hole has a much larger base of support to draw on, so it might be better in the long run to go with that?

Wondering if any of you nerds out there have set up either?

 

[Herzog]

I run two Pi-Holes for redundancy because I hated not having the blocking when down for upgrades or maintenance. I really like the software, it's been pretty solid for me. A nice feature that was added is that you can do all your local internal DNS with it too, which has been handy.

I originally ran it on a Raspberry but now I run two hypervisored (esxi) Intel NUCs with various virtual servers/services on them. Nextcloud, bitwarden, plex, etc.

 

[Stephen]

I have a home server (old HP i7 box) that I hypervisor a couple things on, and I thought about going that route. But, Raspberry Pi's are so cheap, and I liked the idea of this being a separate device in my brain for some reason.

Have you added on any of the additional tools, like parental controls and content filtering? Or are you just using it for ad blocking?

 

[Herzog]

I have a home server (old HP i7 box) that I hypervisor a couple things on, and I thought about going that route. But, Raspberry Pi's are so cheap, and I liked the idea of this being a separate device in my brain for some reason.

Have you added on any of the additional tools, like parental controls and content filtering? Or are you just using it for ad blocking?

I've just added some extra lists to the filtering to get rid of somethings I don't want in the house. Mostly ads, but I do have a porn list block and everything tiktok is blocked.

Here's what I currently have... I haven't audited or updated the lists in a long time.



You also end up white-listing and black-listing random things over time to keep things sailing smoothly, but after that I have rarely touched it.

I agree on the separate idea - especially for power backup reasons; who cares if plex goes down as long as I can still facetime grandma during a power outage . That was the nice thing about the pi, super low power consumption. I think you'll like it a lot

 

[TRD270]

Guess I must be getting old.... this is what I thought of

 

[Herzog]

I forgot to add, with pi-hole you can create groups and have certain lists blocked for some groups and not for others. So if you don't want anybody in your home to see what you post on RME you can just block that group but allow your group.

 

[Stephen]

One of my goals here is to design a "soft" parental controlled network. Our kids are too young to use the internet, and we don't let them have access to phone or tablets or anything either. Personally, I'd love that to be the case until they're in Jr. High, but I doubt that'll happen! But I want to get things in place and play with the settings so its ready to roll when my 2.5 year old finally figures out how to unlock mom's phone.

Basically I want to keep unwanted content out, but still give them quite a bit of latitude. I also don't want bad sites to just pop up and say "BLOCKED!!", because I feel like that will trigger the rebellious side where they want to find out what's behind the block. I want to figure out a way to direct traffic to some sort of soft landing page so it's less obvious. That'll take time to figure out.

 

[Herzog]

Basically I want to keep unwanted content out, but still give them quite a bit of latitude. I also don't want bad sites to just pop up and say "BLOCKED!!", because I feel like that will trigger the rebellious side where they want to find out what's behind the block. I want to figure out a way to direct traffic to some sort of soft landing page so it's less obvious. That'll take time to figure out.

Yea there's not a "blocked" page, it just fails to resolve with the pi-hole. I agree, I hope they don't ever change that.

Also - it used to be a lot nicer when most of the phone app stuff used dns for ads. They've gotten smarter and now go direct to IP address because of these ad blockers. Cat and mouse I guess.

 

[Stephen]

Yea there's not a "blocked" page, it just fails to resolve with the pi-hole. I agree, I hope they don't ever change that.

Also - it used to be a lot nicer when most of the phone app stuff used dns for ads. They've gotten smarter and now go direct to IP address because of these ad blockers. Cat and mouse I guess.

Same problem with streaming services. Hard to scrub those ads out.

 

[Spork]

I'm running pi-hole just a basic install, no parent controls, no add ons. I thought setup and install was easy there are just a few things that pop up every now and then that I work around. Example, the stupid google ad stuff that shows up at the top of a search need to be ignored and you actually look at results vs what google is trying to direct you to. On the adsense stuff I end up deleting all the crap before the URL to get to the page I want to look at. For some reason Dominos pizza doesn't play well and I end up disabling blocking for 5 minutes to order a pizza if required. Most the time I don't notice it's even doing anything until I go away from my home network and wonder where all the ads come from.

 

[nnnnnate]

I literally did a clean install yesterday on a pi at work and brought it home to set up. I messed around with it for a while and broke my WiFi trying to add it as the dns. I gave up after getting the WiFi back working. The meds wore off and everything was a struggle.

I did have adds blocked when I manually set my iPad dns to the pihole and connected with a wire.

Maybe I’ll work on it more this weekend. I’ve got a router x and unifi ap ac lite. I couldn’t get my phone to connect to the ap to try and look at settings there.

 

[Stephen]

Set up the Pi-Hole today with Unbound; super smooth. Already doing a great job with just the default block lists. I'll toy around with a few more lists and such, but all told took me about an hour from getting the Raspberry-Pi in the mail to redirecting my DNS to the Pi-Hole.
I think my favorite part about it is being able to have a 24th Century Starfleet LCARS GUI! 🤓

 

[Stephen]

I literally did a clean install yesterday on a pi at work and brought it home to set up. I messed around with it for a while and broke my WiFi trying to add it as the dns. I gave up after getting the WiFi back working. The meds wore off and everything was a struggle.

I did have adds blocked when I manually set my iPad dns to the pihole and connected with a wire.

Maybe I’ll work on it more this weekend. I’ve got a router x and unifi ap ac lite. I couldn’t get my phone to connect to the ap to try and look at settings there.

If you need help, let me know. I can see how it could be confusing.

 

[Stephen]

Anyone play with using RegEx blocking? Just barely starting to read about it, seems interesting and robust? Possibly a way to block search terms/results?

 

[RockChucker]

I’m still swimming around trying to learn about pi-hole. I didn’t even know this was a thing until you posted this. I think I need to get a raspberry pi and build one. Which pi did you use @Stephen ?

 

[Stephen]

I’m still swimming around trying to learn about pi-hole. I didn’t even know this was a thing until you posted this. I think I need to get a raspberry pi and build one. Which pi did you use @Stephen ?

I got a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, but only because it has a gigabit ethernet port. For a Pi-Hole, you can get away with one of the much less robust models if you want to use a USB-ethernet dongle. I just liked that it was all in one.