DNS Ad blocking

[Dansterdam]

A while ago Linus did a video where he added a raspberry pi into the network to block ads. However I was wondering if this is possible to do accomplish the same thing with a DNS server adjustment on my router instead?

 

I have done some research and there are some forums advising using the cloudflare ranges (1.1.1.1) but their documentation doesn’t state that ad blocking is included.

 

My question is as follows, does anyone have any experience with these or any other providers and are they actually viable, or is the only real option the one highlighted in the video? 

[Oshino Shinobu]

Cloudflare doesn't block ads on their public DNS servers. I use their DNS and get ads. I did run PiHole myself for a bit but got rid of it because it caused more issues than it solved as it breaks things like Google shopping and the ad links at the top of search results. Okay if you're the only person using it and can work around it, but a pain for others, especially if they're not very tech literate.

 

There's plenty of ad blocking public DNS servers. A google search will turn up loads you can try and see which works best for you.

 

Few examples, though I've not tried them myself:

https://alternate-dns.com/

https://adguard-dns.io/en/public-dns.html

 

[OhioYJ]

11 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

I did run PiHole myself for a bit but got rid of it because it caused more issues than it solved as it breaks things like Google shopping and the ad links at the top of search results.

 

You can customize what gets blocked and what doesn't get blocked with a PiHole. It's essentially loading a hosts file. So you can modify it. I know when I load hosts file for people I typically remove things that break Google shopping and Google advertising links, as most people don't even realize they are clicking advertisements. I'm really only trying to stop malicious stuff anyways. I use a PiHole here at the house, works well for us.

 

I know years ago there were a few times I used OpenDNS to filter out things at times. I believe they still offer free accounts and let you customize things. Might be worth looking into.

[Oshino Shinobu]

5 minutes ago, OhioYJ said:

 

You can customize what gets blocked and what doesn't get blocked with a PiHole. It's essentially loading a hosts file. So you can modify it. I know when I load hosts file for people I typically remove things that break Google shopping and Google advertising links, as most people don't even realize they are clicking advertisements. I'm really only trying to stop malicious stuff anyways. I use a PiHole here at the house, works well for us.

 

I know years ago there were a few times I used OpenDNS to filter out things at times. I believe they still offer free accounts and let you customize things. Might be worth looking into.

I know, and I configured it, but I had to constantly add new things to it and yet more would still appear that got blocked. Some really obscure stuff would break, like loading parts of the Renault website needed to update the infotainment system wouldn't work. Hainvg to go track down the domain that was needed to ublock it and such was a pain. I could deal with it on my own, but it's annoying for others when they have to keep asking me to unblock things.

 

It works for sure, but I found it to be more a pain than it was worth.

[Avocado Diaboli]

I use adguard DNS on my mobile devices and it pretty reliably blocks ads in most apps and websites. It can have side-effects in certain instances, for example if you try to connect to a Wi-Fi network that simply doesn't like the fact that you're using a manually set DNS server, but it's easy to turn off in those instances. It also helps that I've got unlimited data so I'm not required to immediately log into any available Wi-Fi network, but your mileage may vary. For home network use I'm content on blocking stuff via browser based ad blockers. I don't see many ads otherwise anyway, since most online interactions happen through a browser in my case. It's served me well so I don't see the need to configure a PiHole or mess with a specific ad blocking DNS server just for that.

[Alex Atkin UK]

I avoid DNS ad blocking as it breaks things like cashback sites for shopping online, as well as the odd website in general.

 

Browser ad blocking is more flexible as you can enable/disable it on a site by site basis.

[Falcon1986]

1 hour ago, Dansterdam said:

My question is as follows, does anyone have any experience with these or any other providers and are they actually viable, or is the only real option the one highlighted in the video? 

I moved from PiHole to Adguard Home running on the same Raspberry Pi 4B and have not had a problem. They're intended to achieve the same result but I've found that Adguard seems to do a better job of blocking ads network-wide.

 

Adguard for mobile and iOS are good, too.

 

If you need more customization than Adguard's public DNS, you can host it yourself or in the cloud.