I’m thinking of starting to use an ad blocking dns to better protect myself and I was thinking of trying LibreDNS, so I figured I’d pick your brains and see what people think about it.
So feel free to give me your opinions please, and pros/cons are welcome.
Thank you.
P.S. In case it helps/matters my usage case is I’d like to just set it up in my router settings and then have it do it’s bussiness automatically on everything that I own/connect instead of having another app or whatever with a bunch of settings that I have to configure like NextDNS or Adguard DNS, etc. I wanna keep it nice and simple.
What do you think about Pi-hole?
You don’t have to run it on a Pi necessarily. I’m happily using it since 2 years. Easy setup (docker container), add some blocklists with their URL, tell your router (I have an AVM) to use the Pihole as only DNS provider (remove potential fallback options) and you are good to go. Additionally, you can set your own DNS records for local resolution.
No offence but that sounds way to complicated for what I’m looking for at the moment. In the future if I decide I wanna mess around with dns’s some more, yeah, what you propose could be interesting.
Why not just using an /etc/hosts file that is blocking certain servers. On https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts you kind find hosts files blocking various types of servers (adware, maleware, fake news, porn, etc.)
Like you pointed out yourself what you suggest would not help when I connect my phone to the wifi, or my quest 3, or if/when I need to dual boot windows, etc.
Also pretty please people I am not asking for different ways in which to use dns’s and which one would be best(that type of stuff might come in later), for now I just wanna know what people think of LibreDNS… And if using LibreDNS has any pros or cons in your opinions.
I run my own make of StevenBlack/hosts on my devices. About a year back I started my own wireguard server and added my hosts files on the server so all my devices are protected as I travel a lot.
I have Adguard home running on a Pizero that blocks trackers/ads from devices i cannot change the DNS. It runs quite well on my router, super easy set up.
You could run it on an old laptop or computer running a server and will do the same thing
Ok, well thank you for the suggestions everyone, but is seems this thread is moot.
Because after checking the dns part of the settings of my router more closely apparently it has a bunch of dns’s already built in that you can just select, and I just chose Adguard from the list.
So for now I seem to be good, will see how it behaves in time.
I have not used LibreDNS myself, but I think I’ve reason people often recommend running things like pi-hole is to for the control.
When running a simple DNS to do ad-blocking, if there is a false positive you’re going not going to be able to override it without undoing the change and using a different DNS for everything.
Often you might not even get error messages that fully explain what the problem is, because the developers of whatever site/service you’re trying to use aren’t coding their thing to be smart about partial connections to you due to ad blocking. Imagine trying to log into your Meta Quest and it keeps saying Invalid Username, when in reality you are entering the correct one but it can’t reach a particular blocked server.
Facebook is pretty big so unlikely to have a false positive from LibreDNS, but maybe the VR server could be different, or another service or app is more niche- you just won’t know. One thing that gets blocked for me constantly is links I click from emails, because while I do what them sometimes, they are technically tracking me and send me to data collection sites before giving me my requested content.
Using a pihole or other service, you can at least get a list of what it’s blocking and can unblock as needed.
So, you’re at the mercy of whoever DNS server you’re using. You might be just fine, and honestly probably will be for 99% of the stuff. It’s just the 1% that can get you, and you might not know it.
