[Mashiro]

A free & self-hosted DNS sinkhole Adblocker

Many of you may already know AdGuard as a application for Android and iOS to block advertising and other bad stuff on your Android or iOS device via a local VPN or proxy on the device itself. It has a limited free version and a premium version based on subscription / licenses per device with much more features and configuration abilities. It is by far one of the best and most popular Adblockers for mobile devices.

Some of you may also have heard of a free and open source project called Pi-Hole that allows you block advertising and other stuff on DNS level by sending the request to a DNS sinkhole (0.0.0.0). Pi-Hole has become very popular as a self-hosted application for the Raspberry Pi but can also be hosted on any other normal Linux VPS. You bascially run your own local DNS server that blocks domains that are serving advertising on websites or other bad sites (spam, malware, etc.).

Now mix together AdGuard and Pi-Hole: you get AdGuard Home. AdGuard Home is (as the title says) a free, open source and self-hosted DNS sinkhole Adblocker by the makers of the AdGuard app. It can be compared to Pi-Hole as it basically uses the same concept to block advertising as Pi-Hole. However AdGuard Home comes with more features onboard that aren't available with Pi-Hole or can only be installed additionally with a lot of hassle via SSH. AdGuard Home is based on the code of the AdGuard DNS server service.

AdGuard Home Features
- Choose what exactly will the server block or not block.
- Monitor your network activity.
- Add your own custom filtering rules.
- You are the only one who's in control of your own server.
- Blocking ads and trackers.
- Built-in DHCP server.
- HTTPS for the Admin interface.
- Encrypted DNS upstream servers (DNS-over-HTTPS, DNS-over-TLS, DNSCrypt).
- Cross-platform.
- Running as a DNS-over-HTTPS or DNS-over-TLS server.
- Blocking phishing and malware domains.
- Parental control (blocking adult domains).
- Force Safe search on search engines.
- Per-client (device) configuration.
- Access settings (choose who can use AGH DNS).
- Running without root privileges.

Text = Compared features are available with AdGuard Home but aren't available with Pi-Hole (can possibly be added by additional work, software and configuration via SSH).


Sadly DNS sinkhole based Adblockers always have a little downside:

Essentially, any advertising that shares a domain with content cannot be blocked by a DNS-level blocker.

Is there a chance to handle this in the future? DNS will never be enough to do this. Our only option is to use a content blocking proxy like what we do in the standalone AdGuard applications. We're going to bring this feature support to AdGuard Home in the future. Unfortunately, even in this case, there still will be cases when this won't be enough or would require quite complicated configuration.

Example: You cannot block advertising in Youtube videos. If you attempt to do so you will actually also block any Youtube video. No videos will play. Youtube will be broken. I tried this with Pi-Hole and it didn't work well at all. Nothing in Youtube worked.


Installation

You can easily install it on Linux or Mac with the command below:

Code: (Select All)

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/master/scripts/install.sh | sh

If you prefer you can also install everything manually step by step: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHo...ng-Started

Another very easy way to deploy AdGuard Home is by Docker: https://hub.docker.com/r/adguard/adguardhome

If you use Snap (e.g. Ubuntu Server) you can install it via the Snap Store: https://snapcraft.io/adguard-home


Official AdGuard Home GitHub Repo: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome

Wiki: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/wiki

[deanhills]

A brilliant topic @Mashiro, thanks for posting it.  I checked out adguard.com, and noticed there was a download for Windows too.  Which I am particularly interested in as off late I've got VERY irritated with bad ads that come up.  You know the kind where they push bogus news items under your nose that are totally irrelevant to your searches.

OK, now I need some advice.  How does one get the mix right?  For example, post4vps.com thrives on advertising, so we want visitors to click on ads.  Also, quite a number of "free" sites are quite explicit in ruling that one's Ad blocker needs to be turned off in order to use their service.  So there is a bit of collateral damage involved here.  If you use an ad blocker you get blocked possibly without even being aware of it.  By Websites who block visitors who have ad blockers enabled.  Like they may detect an ad blocker of the Visitor and block the visitor.  I really don't mind seeing ads that are judiciously applied, well out of my face, and that are directly relevant to my searches.  I want to block BOGUS ads - the useless and irrelevant kind like "most beautiful twins", and "royal this and the other" and pop-ups that still come up in spite of my browser setting that is supposed to disable them.

[Mashiro]

@deanhills Hey Bud. Thanks for the feedback!

Unfortunately I have never used the AdGuard Windows client. I only used the AdGuard Android application on my Android devices to get rid of advertising in web browsers and other applications. I was fed up of advertising eating up time and bandwith. Firefox, while it has addon support to use ad blockers, is absolutely super slow on mobile devices.

I guess you can simply whitelist web pages where you don't want advertising to be removed / filtered out. There should be a whitelist somewhere in the application. The Android app also has a whitelist where you can add domains / sites that will not be filtered.

Personally I use µBlock Origin in my current web browser (Microsoft Edge Chromium) and it works the best so far. I enabled all available filters plus the filters for my country. I rarely see advertising on any websites. I can also turn off the ad blocker on a per site basis to basically whitelist the page (to allow ads on that site). I can really recommend µBlock Origin for web browsers.

About pages that block you for running an ad blocker without any way to use the page with an ad blocker. For your own sake and sanity I would recommend to avoid such sites. They clearly DO NOT welcome you. I stopped visiting such sites unless I really really need to get to content on that page. I don't even bother anymore with such sites. Bascially whoever tells me what to do can pack their bag and go the other way around. I recommend anyone who uses ad blockers to do the same. The sites blocking users this way harm themselves more... at their own fault.

[debjit]

I have a pi-hole virtual box running on my machine and I am very happy with it. I block the Microsoft pages and update with pihole which takes the load off from my mikrotik servers.
I found they also offer hosted DNS Servers. I might use it with a VPN server. Let's check if they worked with a VPN tunnel.
I found they opensource the code so check it here
https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardDNS