I’ve been aware of pi-hole for a while now, but never bothered with it because I do most web browsing on a laptop where browser extensions like uBlock origin are good enough. However, with multiple streaming services starting to insert adds into my paid subscriptions, I’m looking to upgrade to a network blocker that will also cover the apps on my smart TV.
I run most of my self hosted services on a proxmox server, so I’d like something that’ll run as an LXC container or a VM. I’m also vaguely aware that various competing applications have come out since pi-hole first gained popularity. Is pi-hole still the best thing going, or are there better options?
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Pfblockerng on pfsense is very powerful.
There’s nothing really bad with PiHole but I moved from it to AdGuard, both on proxmox. The UI brought me in, makes management a bit easier. It also supports DoH right out of the box.
Try em both. See what you think.
Pi-hole is great, but unfortunately ads in YouTube or other streaming services is not one of the things it blocks.
PiHole and similar services just use DNS blocking, which only works if the ads are served via a third-party ad server. Sites with their own ad inventory (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc) can’t be blocked this way since they can just serve the ads from the same domain as their regular content.
I wonder why we don’t have AI browser extensions that can recognise and obscure possible ads / unwanted content yet
Because the AI isn’t needed, and would be computationally expensive.
Extensions like ublock origin and sponsorblock work just fine.
Simple: That would be the opposite of making money for companies
Glad I read this - all my other devices block ads perfectly well already, but was wondering if I could block YouTube ads on my Apple TV… I guess not!
Not sure of any downside yet but setting your country to Albania via vpn removes all YouTube ads on Apple TV. Was just informed of this yesterday and as mentioned there may be reasons to not do this.
If you’re comfortable self hosting you can use isponsorblocktv to block ads/sponsorship on YouTube on AppleTv and various smart TVs. I use this + Pi-Hole https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV
Your best bet is getting a platform your can sideload apps onto and running SmartTube
pihole is mature and very functional. i jumped in last summer, no regrets.
I ran Pi-hole for years. Switched to adguardhome running on 2 servers (primary and secondary) with AGH sync keeping the two instances identical. I like the UI better, dns rewrites, and the ability to simply block services entirely with a single click.
I did this as well, I still have 2 pihole instances running with gravitysync for now, but AGH sync is much easier to setup and maintain. My 2 pihole instances are running for my guest network only and AGH is running everything else.
I run pihole on proxomox, and also opnsense in the same box. Then you can forward all port 53 traffic to your pihole. Some devices have hard-coded DNS that will bypass the DHCP DNS.
Some chromecasts stop working when you do that.
Chuck 'em in the garbage and get something that doesn’t break when you insist on privacy.
Really? I run several Chromecasts, and I block their access to all DNS services except my internal Pi-holes. They work just fine.
It’s probably not blocking DNS-over-HTTPS
Lol - not my first rodeo. I’m blocking dns.google as well, and I’m 99.999% certain Google won’t have coded Chromecasts to use anyone else’s DNS servers.
Yeah, I don’t know if it’s all models, but the ultras do at least.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Chromecast/comments/pmt4cw/chromecast_ultra_just_updated_and_now_wont_work/
Ah - I only have the Chromecast GTVs. Good to know I don’t need to pay for an upgrade then!
Adguard home is like pihole, but has built in encrypted DNS options. For easy mode NextDNS.
They pretty much all have the same block lists to choose from.
I use 2 cloudflare containers that the pihole points to. That gives me DNS over https but it’s more of a mission to set up.
I have the LCARs theme for my PiHole.
All other details are irrelevant.
I have the LCARS theme for my HomeAssistant, which takes telemetry from PiHole.
Now we just need a locally hosted voice assistant with “computer” as the wake word.
That is completely possible right now.
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The complicated one, ha-lcars. It takes a while to get things looking good - looks like total trash out of the box, actually.
Could you share a screenshot of your final result?
I’ve only got one interface done at the moment:
Oh yeah, that looks much better than any of the included themes. Nice work!
I enjoy that it reminds me of a Star Trek console.
Probably by design but all the same.
That’s what LCARS means, it’s the name of the computer console in Star Trek. In the show, it stands for “Library Computer Access and Retrieval System” although it’s often used for stuff other than the library computer too.
Pi-hole and AdGuard home are both good. It kind of comes down to which UI you like better.
I set up pihole a few months ago. I added a few dozen of the highest recommended block lists, but I wasn’t impressed at all. It didn’t seem very effective at blocking ads in both real world tests and tests that I found online specifically for testing your adblocker.
The best test I have is my wife complaining, that ads in Google results cannot be opened. It seems to work flawlessly for me 😂
On a more serious note, what tests are these? The thing is, the ad domain is either in the blocklist or not. Ads inside apps are hard to block (I even have adaway on my android, and some slip through as eg Instagram reuses the backend domains/endpoints for ad delivery).
I have a pihole setup and did not get any ads when testing there. I think you might want to add more lists to your pihole.
What lists do you have? They pretty much all came up for me. I tried it again with ublock origin to compare, but none showed up with ublock origin.
Thank you! I’ll give this another try this weekend!
I use knot-resolver with the big block list from https://oisd.nl/ and it works great.
AdGuard Home and blocky are other popular options. I switched over to AdGuard Home a while back because it supported DNS over HTTPS although I’m not sure if that’s still a relevant reason. I run AGH as a docker container but it is easy to run in a LXC or VM. There’s also a tool to sync configs if you need multiple instances. Notice: AGH block lists are formatted like uBlock Origin lists so you will not be able to use PiHole style lists.
DNS based ad blockers won’t work when ads are served from the same place as the content. Which is why DNS based ad blockers don’t work against Twitch or YouTube. So YMMV.
If you’re looking to block interface ads and select streaming service ads there are block lists available like this one. The game with smart TVs is blocking the ads breaks the TV a little because sometimes it calls back to the same servers for updates and misc info like weather.
If you are more into a full DNS solution that can also block Technitium DNS is a reasonable choice. It is fairly userfriendly, can be run in an LXC easily (I am doing exactly that), able to use multiple block lists in any combination you want, can be controlled by an API, is regularly updated,etc.
I couldn’t be happier with it, even though the learning curve is somewhat steep, when you are new to DNS. It is a fully fledged DNS server after all.
NextDNS is awesome if you want the simple solution, and don’t have any hardware to install services on. Thee free version is somehwta limited to queries(300k per month), but personally didn’t hit those when I was using the free tier.
NextDNS has a lot of nice customization and can easily had custom block lists. The pro version is 2euros a month I believe. I personally stick with NextDNS due to never having to worry about updating the service and it always just works. I also have it hooked to my Tailnet, that way all my devices use it by default.
But ofc, Pihole, Adguard and the rest are also awesome. Best to just pick one that looks good for you. The end goal here is to just have something running in the background rather than nothing.
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