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Comment by wafflemaker | Hacker News Reader

I didn't want to write in this thread. Complaining is just not good for the person complaining.

But this: >My phone is always VPNed into my home network which has DNS-level ad and tracker blocking. This doesn't cover all the bases though.

Is a great idea for a fun weekend project. Any tips, good practices or things to watch out for when setting it up?

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Not OP, but with DNS ad blocking like pi-hole you need to be aware that any "normies" living with you will hate it. DNS blockers silently break any kind of "sponsored links" in search results and a lot of the links in email marketing, and most people use those frequently. They don't take kindly to being told they're doing it wrong and have to change their browsing habits for benefits they don't perceive.

Pi-hole let's you define different groups with different ad blocking policies. Then you can define which dhcp ips go in each group. Works very well. The "normies" won't even notice

I have a Firewalla. They run a WireGuard proxy (sort of like a DERP in Tailscale), so I use that. It actually works more often than Tailscale somehow, and since it's just WG, it works perfectly with my GL.iNet travel hotspots. Firewalla also has ad blocking baked in with less restrictive blacklists, so that's what I use.

Before I got the FW, I used Tailscale and AdGuard Home.

Tailscale can do this very easily

Or you can just throw a couple bucks at something like nextdns and not have to use the VPN bit for mobile DNS ad block

I use both

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