Hacker News Reader

Comment by tumblewit | Hacker News Reader

I made an open source DoT/DoH app for iOS called PrivateDNS (more lists and turning off on wifi coming soon just submitted for review) that includes Quad9. However from India I get very high latencies accessing some of the DNS (needed for testing my app) especially the adblocking one. NextDNS is good since it has local servers. But otherwise pretty much Google and Cloudflare is the only option that works well with Cloudflare sometimes flaky. At home I can have PiHole + unbound but I would like to have a decent fast adblocking dns while on mobile data (whenever I am outside anyway these days) because wireguard is really high latency for me and my home internet is worse than mobile sometimes.

View on HN

What about AdGuard’s performance in your area? They seem to have DNS profiles similar to Quad9 but that also include ad and tracker blocking:

https://kb.adguard.com/en/dns/setup-guide

They’re Russian if that matters to you one way or the other: https://adguard.com/en/our-partners.html

My next update will get Adguard, Cleanbrowsing with all types of filters that they offer and both DoT and DoH (assuming apple is okay with it). It's not too bad when it comes to latency but they don't have servers here so anything that is outside the country won't be fun to use. But if anyone is using them in the country they have servers in it would be great to know how they work. Using root servers with pihole is usually best of both worlds when it comes to latency and privacy.

Edit: I made the app because I wanted a simple 30 second solution for anyone to improve their privacy without any VPN profiles and using a fast DNS. I tried a few free apps on the App Store but they didn't work well or were not updated in months. So I decided Ill make one.

Nice app! I created configuration profiles for convenience at https://encrypted-dns.party but an app with providers pre-configured is way more convenient. Some smaller providers that come to mind for ad-blocking: Adhole, AhaDNS, BlahDNS, LibreDNS, and Usable Privacy DNS.

Thank you. I have put these in a list I'm creating to add to the app. I only recently learned to make iOS apps and SwiftUI is rather still new. Rather I wanted to learn how make apps so I thought might as well make something people can use. I plan on making it much better UI wise along with region-specific DNS lists or some method of sorting them.

There are some other encrypted DNS servers in India, at least arapurayil in Mumbai and arvin in Bangalore.

https://dnscrypt.info/map

Thanks ill be adding more to the app and look into some local ones possibly add region specific tabs for those interested in using something local for better performance. I just added popular ones to avoid any controversy (not that these DNS aren't without controversy but at least I am not the complete blame). I am looking for adblocking and tracking prevention DNS actually like NextDNS but free and fast. Adguard seems to be the only one globally with the same IPs (since its hardcoded).

I get significantly higher latency with quad9 here in the US too, compared to Google or Cloudflare.

Personally I have found Google to work well almost always. The reason I like DNS on iPhone itself is because assuming the iPhone is super optimised for handling https traffic and also an extremely fast device, not to mention a very stable software platform compared to the terrible home networking gear people own that has some outdated linux firmware that can be buggy at dns resolution. For most on HN its probably not the case but I've seen too many people use old hardware for a basic home internet setup and I'm hoping using on device DNS can greatly improve the experience. At the cost of small hit to the battery life of course but I would have to test that which would be a fun test to do.

Have you sent a traceroute and the results of a chaos query to your ISP, so they can fix whatever routing problem you're encountering? There's nowhere in the continental US that's more than 5-6ms away from a Quad9 server cluster.

Have you considered creating a wireguard tunnel to your home network?

When i'm on mobile data I can barely get it to send imessage. I have a Pi4 right now on which I plan to install it (diet pi seems to have really easy setup for wire guard since i had trouble on the raspios aarch64 lite image, i think headers were missing) but for now nextdns seems to be okay. NextDNS has their own app for iOS but I sometimes have trouble on that too so i just switch DNS and see what works best. The ISP DNS are definitely worse than anything.

You need to install linux-headers-rpi to build wireguard on Raspberry Pi OS - should be good then.

Yes actually I tried it last when the raspios 64 beta was just released and didn't have an SSD for the pi (SD cards are really slow). I plan on adding another pi for building and one for DNS so that if the Pi is compiling it won't slow down any DNS queries (which it shouldn't but you never know).

pivpn makes wireguard very easy to set up.

I found dietpi to offer a very friendly home server setup. RaspiOS is of course great if you want to do things manually but dietpi seems to have taken r/homeserver crowd very seriously.

I'm sure, but for anyone reading these comments thinking that they still need to compile the linux kernel to run wireguard on any debian distro: they don't. For 32-bit, at least. I have not tried 64-bit yet. I'm letting that one marinate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com