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Comment by twodave | Hacker News Reader

If you're going this far, might as well do as the author did and add a pi-hole to the mix, issue some credentials to your phone and block ads and/or other stuff via DNS everywhere you go. I also use this to remote into my work computer from wherever I am, using my travel laptop, an iPad or even just my cell phone.

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This. I started to tunnel my traffic via my Wireguard VPN (when outside) to cut these 30% of connections that are blocked by Pihole.

Pihole is really a great piece of work. It uses standard components (dnsmasq, standard lists) and does it well. I used to have it in a docker container but moved it to the ISP box when I got a new one (a French ISP called Free provides you with an Internet box that has a built-in VPN (WG or OpenVPN) and allows you to create VMs - this is where I ultimately moved Pihole because it is my DNS and DHCP server)

This is precisely what I do and it's great. Built myself a workstation desktop last year that I wanted to access remotely via an older laptop and it's worked beautifully, even when I was out in Europe for a week last summer.

pihole is really lightweight, you could just run it on your local laptop and save yourself the hop to your home network for all DNS requests

I could set up pihole on my local laptop. And on my wife's laptop. And on my kids' phones. And on my work laptop. And...

Or I could just set it up on one tiny server (doesn't have to be a pi, but I happen to have one that isn't doing anything else), point my gateway at it for DNS, and give my whole family + any VPN connections filtering for free.

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