Oh, sorry I misunderstood. It is ideally run on a gateway, but can also be run on the same machine if using a UNIX-like OS that isn't locked own. I do interface with it a lot because I like to look at logs and dumps and experiment with configurations, but that's not required. Setup consists of a single script that sets up all the servers and imports the data. Any changes while using consist of editing text files. There are some tiny shell scripts and some helper tools I wrote in C to facilitate hands-on DNS management as I am very active in managing DNS data, I like to see IP addresses rather than hide them. I intentionally do many DNS lookups semi-manually. This is purely personal preference, not required. This system could be "set it and forget it" once you have the proxy configs and DNS data you want. The amount of DNS data I actually need to survive is quite small. Those outsourced blocklists the ad blockers use could be larger than personally curated whitelists, depending on the user. The DNS and proxy servers use little system resources.
A programmer with an excellent track record for reliability once said something like "The best interface is no interface." This is how I like things. I do not want to be required to costantly interact. He is the author of the DNS server and daemontools, which I use to control the servers.
HTH