[smarterhome]

AdGuard Home is amazing! I used PiHole for a time but did run into small issues quite at lot. Mind you nothing serious but things like these are only really useful if they just work. Adguard Home works without any issues on my Pi setup via docker-compose [1] and it even runs on a second Pi as backup using a cool container called adguardhome-sync [2] to keep their configurations in sync. I am not seeing any ads in my network anymore and it is quite interesting to see how many tracking/ad requests are sent by some devices...

1 - https://thesmarthomejourney.com/2021/05/24/adguard-pihole-dn...

2 - https://thesmarthomejourney.com/2023/02/12/adguardhome-sync-...

[vin047]

The real eye-opener is when you start redirecting DNS 53 requests to your own DNS server and block DoT/DoQ/DoH – so many devices/apps just trying to reach out to their hardcoded DNS servers for tracking/ad targeting.

[briHass]

Unsurprisingly, Google and Facebook IoT junk is the worst. They both hardcode their own DNS, and I've caught Google devices ignoring the DNS IP from DHCP (not the gateway) and attempting to resolve from the gateway (with external blocked)