So I’m a bit new to the homenetworking and homelab situation but I have a Unifi DM-SE as my router and I’m trying to establish the best way to block ads at home and away.
So I am currently primarily using either extensions or content blocking apps on my devices to block ads but I’ve been looking into DNS based solutions lately.
I’ve looked into setting up PiHole and it looks pretty simple to do and I have a dedicated small computer with Proxmox that I use for things like Homebridge, Scrypted and I think could set it up easily on there. But it looks like it only works at home. A lot of people say you can set up a VPN but I’d rather not have to turn on and off my VPN on my phone whenever I leave home.
I also looked into Next DNS which seems also pretty easy to setup, but I couldn’t tell if it’s better to set this up per device or network wide via my router.
There’s also the extensions and content blocking apps which would be device specific.
Which is the fastest, performance wise, and easiest to interact with daily?
uBlock origin + Pihole. uBlock covers just about everything on your PC but I mainly use Pihole for mobile devices and as a “catch all net”
Pihole v6 Beta (and I have a fallback to v5). Runs together with unbound in recoursive mode. Super slick and fast!
If you’re on android you can use tasker to automatically connect to VPN when not at home
I’m running unbound. I have a cronjob (bash+python) that downloads StevenBlack’s blacklist (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts), turns it into an unbound config file, and restarts unbound.
Happy to provide a copy if anyone is interested.