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Comment by fireattack | Hacker News Reader

I want to try these DNS-based blockers (AGH or Pi-hole) but am always wondering: is it easy to temporarily disable, or "debug" them?

I have encountered multiple times (not common, but not trivial) that a filter blocks something wrong. With traditional ad-blocker as extension, I can quickly find it out by using build-in logger, and then simply either temporarily disable them or add the site to whitelist with a single click (if I feel like it, I can write my own rule too.)

If I have to change my DNS setting everytime this happens with these DNS-based blockers, I feel like to stick with extensions since I don't really use my phone to browse Internet too much.

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PiHole has a web admin UI that's pretty slick. It has options to disable the entire thing indefinitely/for a set period of time if you need to, and it can log all DNS queries, so you can override/manually block anything you need. There's also nifty charts and metrics to show you how much traffic has been blocked.

I found that, after tinkering with blocklists for a bit, I turned off logging altogether and just let it run. The one thing that gives us grief occasionally is (unsurprisingly) tracking links from promo emails and social media. These are usually easy enough to bypass, but it can be a pain for non-tech-savvy people.

Thanks!

Does it have "cosmetic filters" (the ones that block certain elements on page) or similar feature?

No. It inherently cannot. Pi-Hole isn't a proxy where all traffic is flowing through it and has a chance to be modified. Pi-Hole is strictly answering the question, "What is the IP address for this hostname?" If a given hostname is known to host trackers or something undesirable Pi-Hole will claim it's an unknown host so the device is unable to reach it.

This is a feature that has been requested, but isn't implemented yet. Suggest you give it a thumbs up on github as they implement things in order of highest number of thumbs.

Please don't, as explained in sibling comment it's not possible with DNS blocking.

It wouldn't be DNS blocking. The feature request on the project is about adding an HTTPS MITM Proxy that would then do the cosmetic filters among other things.

AGH already supports adding AdGuard filters, but for obvious reasons it only applies domain based filters. Adding the MITM proxy would allow for processing of the cosmetic filters too.

More info:

- https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/issues/391

- https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/issues/1228

Ah - fireattack's question was regarding Pi-Hole.

Yep, literally a button that says Disable / Enable.

The only problem is browsers like Chrome that are pretty aggressive with DNS caching.

I setup 2 wireless VLANS on my network and one uses filtered DNS. Just swap between networks as needed. Of course most people aren't going to have that capability.

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