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Comment by pgl | Hacker News Reader

Yes, absolutely! It's way easier to configure your wifi router (or cable modem, or whatever acts as the DHCP server on your network) to use a local DNS server that blocks ads. Then ad blocking just works, whatever you connect to your network.

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is the best way to do this to run something like DD-WRT? Or is there a way to accomplish this with stock router firmware? I ask because I recently tried to install DD-WRT but ran into issue and had to revert to my stock firmware.

Another way to accomplish it if you've got a spare computer (even something like a Raspberry Pi) is to configure it as a DNS server and then use your stock router firmware, if it supports it, to point DNS servers to that computer's local IP. So one device in your home or network would then become the local resolver.

Personally I run dnsmasq on my file server (separate FreeBSD jail), but before then I was running it on my Asus router with pretty much the stock firmware. So I don't think there is a "best" approach specifically - just whatever works for you.

What's your router model?

Very late in seeing this comment! It's a Netgear WNDR3700v4. DD-WRT is supported on it, and i did successfully get it installed, but I had no connection to the internet with it. There was a wiki page for my specific router model with instructions which I followed. I went back & forth with people on their forums and they were pretty much telling me "oh yeah, don't install that version that the instructions tell you to!" and "well yeah, this whole project is beta, so what do you expect?" All of that combined kind of turned me off to this project from now on :/

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