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?
I look after two AdGuard Home installations.
One is local, running on a super-tiny PC (Intel Atom x5, 4 GB RAM, 64 GB eMMC, Debian 12, and I see no reason why AGH wouldn't run just as well on a 2 / 32 GB version of that PC). The average handling time for a DNS request is 30 ms. You could easily do something similar in a Proxmox container, give it a local IP address, and have you router use it as the DNS server instead of whatever it's using now.
The other is in the cloud, running on a virtual server with 1 GB RAM. The average handling time for a DNS request is 10 ms.