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Comment by tilolebo | Hacker News Reader

1. You can a share your config across all your devices. Also works on desktops (AFAIK Blokada is just for mobile)

2. You can create multiple configs and easily switch between those

3. Works everywhere (Pi-hole is very cool but only works within the local network you set it up, AFAIK)

4. On my smartphone Blokada regularly stopped, probably because I use an energy saving profile. I could never keep it running for longer than a few days, no matter what I tried. NextDNS seems to work fine so far, had it running for some weeks without a single crash

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Regarding #3: you could run PiVPN on your PiHole device and remote into the PiHole.

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>On my smartphone Blokada regularly stopped, probably because I use an energy saving profile.

I had an issue with it stopping every couple of minutes, recently I figured out it was Google Fi's VPN causing it to stop after noticing it was only doing it on my phone with a Fi sim and not on my device with a Sprint sim. At some point Fi updated it so that the VPN is always on instead of only turning on when it finds an unsecured wireless network and automatically connected you (which is extremely rare where I live).

> 3. Works everywhere (Pi-hole is very cool but only works within the local network you set it up, AFAIK)

I run a PiHole on an AWS EC2 instance, then VPN to it on my phone. The VPN is configured so that only DNS requests get sent to it and all other traffic just goes straight through the LTE connection so that I'm not paying for all the traffic through AWS.

Could you please elaborate on your setup. How do you achieve sending only DNS traffic over VPN? What do you do when your phone is connected to your home WiFi network?

> How do you achieve sending only DNS traffic over VPN?

I use OpenVPN on both my phone and the server with the "redirect-gateway def1 bypass-dhcp" option enabled on the server. See https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/vpn/only-dns-via-vpn/

> What do you do when your phone is connected to your home WiFi network?

Nothing. The phone still uses the PiHole in AWS. I don't run a PiHole on my home network, as I use uBlock Origin to block ads on my desktop. I make my phone use a PiHole to prevents apps that aren't my web browser from getting ads, such as Google Now.

Thanks for the clarification.I'll give it a trial run to see how it pads out for me.

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