AdGuard Home: Network-wide ads and trackers blocking DNS server

Nothing major but annoying to have to deal with everything being broken because of maintenance or whatever else.

AdGuardHome (and pi-hole) work almost entirely on domain blocklists they regularly download from configurable sources (AdGuardHome also incorporates Google safe browsing). This blocks a lot of stuff, but NextDNS also has options like blocking typo squatting, newly registered domains, domains that are created by domain generation algorithms, and whatever their "AI-driven threat detection" feature is doing. It's hard to tell how useful those features are and there's no reason blocklists couldn't incorporate all those kinds of things. But I have no idea if they do, and outsourcing putting all that together to a service like NextDNS seems like a better solution than a locally hosted option that relies on a user figuring out the right blocklists to use. Although NextDNS also allows you to play with blocklists if you want.

As for simple-adblock vs adblock, I prefer the former because malformed lists won't break DNS, which it does for adblock.

pi-hole was great back in the day but unless you're just keeping on keeping on with an existing install there's better options available now.. AdGuard Home, Blocky, Technitium DNS etc.

I often compare pi-hole to DD-WRT inasmuch as it was awesome back in the day but times have changed and you probably wouldn't use it as first choice these days given what else is now available to you.

AdGuard Home is a lot cleaner to use. In particular it makes it much easier to control routing for queries by domain and supports forwarding over DNS over TLS, DoH, and DoQ natively. SSL support is a breeze. This means that my ISP can see the IP addresses of hosts but not their domain names unless they get aggressive with snooping. The single binary and clean configuration is nice.

PiHole seems to have a better landing page for analytics out of the box. It also works a little better for configuration for some devices.

I’ll likely retire PiHole in favor of AdGuard Home the next time the SD card dies on that Pi.

My preferred configuration is using some fairly invasive scripts to redirect all outbound DNS except to NextDNS. I’ve got blocklists for DoH hosts because I can’t just block port 443. AdGuard then routes to one of two different backends: for local domains it routes to CoreDNS that gets the hosts from my UDM-Pro to give everything nice hostnames. Everything else goes out via DNS over TLS to NextDNS. On PiHole it’s a little more complicated as it can’t directly forward with DNS over TLS.

It’s amazing how many semi-hostile devices this found on my network (looking at you Samsung TV and devices that hard code in Google’s DNS). It also reminds me of how terrible the internet is when I don’t have these protections.

pihole was only using steven black list last time i checked.

[0] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/h...

Of course, but how do you automate this? Using Watchtower? Setup instructions never address this aspect. I get the impression that there’s no standard way to auto-update, and most people only update manually?

Edit: it even has home assistant integration like pihole. I'm going to test it for a few days and see how it performs. So far I have positive impression.