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Comment by iDemonix | Hacker News Reader

I setup PiHole and removed it about 2-3 days later. UBlock Origin is perfect for laptops, but I wanted to see if it'd block YouTube ads and similar on my Smart TV and mobile devices - it didn't. If anything it just caused me grief by interfering with non-ad web services, so I canned it and everything started working again.

I need UBlock Origin as a remote proxy.

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> it'd block YouTube ads and similar on my Smart TV and mobile devices - it didn't

thats because you need to tell DHCP to use the pihole's address as primary DNS

I did. I should point out I work for an ISP, so my day job is managing proxy farms, DNS, and so on. It just didn't seem to stop ads on the Smart TV with any variation of whitelist/blacklist.

That still doesn't fix the ad situation. There's still stuff that goes on at the JS level that a browser ad blocker catches, but a DNS blocker won't. That's been my experience after installing Pihole on the home network.

Even if you do that, there’s some devices (Chromecast, Google Home) that have Google’s DNS hardcoded and ignores the servers passed by DHCP.

This is terrible. What prevents them from doing the same to android phones and tablets?

What happens if you set your firewall to block 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4?

It bricks the device. See these previous discussions.

[1]: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/dnsop/WCVv57IizUSjNb2R...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19170671

You can use an iptables rule on your router to rewrite the address to your custom server, which I have done specifically because Google devices were ignoring DHCP.

Something like...

iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -p udp --dport 53 -j DNAT --to x.x.x.x:53

...should work, and repeat for tcp

I wish PiHole could be more fine-grained. Being able to respond differently depending on which device made the request would be an amazing addition.

For example, I want to blackhole all X-related stuff because I don't use service X and don't want them to track me, but my girlfriend wants to access and use service X. So either we each get an instance of PiHole and tailor it to our specific needs, or we share an instance and one of us is unhappy.

Try adguard DNS, it's pretty good

https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html

For me it blocks most of the time. Sometimes I notice the advertisement coming directly from Youtube servers and passing through. This only seems to happen when using native YouTube clients...

Try opening a few local app on Android and watch the logs.

You'll see connections to Facebook, Google and ad networks.

Pihole and diversion are essential for privacy.

My Android TV when in sleep mode DRILLS Netflix and calls home.

There's no Android devices in my house to test with.

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