[floundy]

I have two pi-holes running concurrently, mainly so it doesn’t ruin the internet for my wife if one goes down. In 4-5 years of running pi-hole I’ve had I think 3 complete failures, 2 were due to cheap SD card corruption and one due to a failed upgrade to pihole v6.

I also excluded most of her devices from any filtering by the pihole because she wants to be able to click the sponsored links and ads on Google. Whatever.

[syntaxing]

That’s why nextDNS is nice, there’s a “allow affiliated link” setting. So it blocks the ads but allows your wife to click on sponsored ad links. How’s do you manage Adblock when you’re not on your network? That’s the main draw of NextDNS for me. Works more or less anywhere

[floundy]

Huh interesting feature, I'll have to check it out today to see if there's enough improvements over pihole to warrant a switch.

I'm effectively always on my network because I use Wireguard to VPN back in to home, so I can easily access my server and RPi dashboards. Though at this point I've whitelisted a few dozen domains that were giving my wife or I issues, and excluded most of her devices because she doesn't want to be on it, so it's pretty hands-off. The only time I have to disable the pihole nowadays is when I'm unsubscribing from an email list and the link is a tracking link. And that's with over 3M domains blocked.

[syntaxing]

Do you notice a battery drain with the VPN always on? I used to use tailscale for this and there was a nontrivial battery penalty

[floundy]

I've never specifically noticed WireGuard anywhere in the top battery consumers on either Android or iOS. Friday I was out of the house all day, and Wireguard running on cellular all day used 1% of my iPhone battery.