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Comment by galangalalgol | Hacker News Reader

I always watch YT in firefox with ublock origin on, it seems to work 100%. It seems like pi-hole would work well too, but my router insists on providing a backup dns server when my pihole fails to find something... Need to go get a new one, preferably meshable.

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There are a few ways to get your client devices to use the pihole:

- configure each client device accordingly (very inconvenient, but mentioning it for completeness)

- configure your router's DHCP service to tell clients that the DNS server is [IP address of pihole] instead of [IP address of router]

- configure your router's upstream DNS to be [IP address of pihole] instead of [what your modem offers] and leave the DHCP service alone (clients use the router as the DNS server)

I suspect you're using the third way, based on the issue you're having. Try the second way instead, so the router isn't even processing client lookups. (Maybe not all routers offer this. I use pfsense which does.)

Anyway, my pihole doesn't block YouTube ads... Can I remedy that?

Many (including google) devices use hardcoded DNS settings. You also need firewall rules to prvent them from using 8.8.8.8 and friends.

Ah, good point. With those firewall rules in place, do such devices seamlessly fall back to whatever they DNS they learned from DHCP?

What I do is set a reverse NAT rule that reverse proxies 8.8.8.8 to my DNS, so to devices where it's hardcoded, they can't tell the difference.

You can also redirect all port 53 traffic to your DNS instead of redirecting IPs one by one.

Brilliant. I'll be trying that on pfsense [0] soon.

[0] https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/recipes/dns-redir...

It's not possible to block YouTube ads with pihole as they're served from the same address as the videos. Pihole does not inspect any content itself. That's why on a laptop/desktop you need ublock origin for the browser.

I've not found a solution for YouTube app on Android TV other than using Vanced! Not sure if Adguard for Android helps either.

The ads are so bad and so frequent in the YouTube app that I hardly ever use it.

No, google bypass pi-hole since years by using the same dns for the content and the ads.

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