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At this point the ads are winning because its getting much harder to stop them. A well tuned pihole is great for browsing and it is really noticeable when Im away from home.
It has to be tuned, blocklists are great but you will definitely be managing the lists yourself. It is SO EASY to do, it is the most user-friendly open-source network tool I have ever used! Sleep on this to your own peril
look into a VPN to your home network when you leave your house. you can also set it to "on demand" so it automatically turns on when you disconnect from your home wifi.
Thats my next step considering that Im getting requests from house members for it. Took some time to smooth out the blocklists and now everyone loves it. Any recommendations for a pi3 running pihole with vpn?
I second the Tailscale recommendation. It was easy and has spoiled me. I notice immediately if I’m browsing my phone at work and I’m not connected to my pihole lol
Nah they're connecting to their home network via a Tailscale exit node which basically runs all your requests traffic through your device/router at home/ external server, P2P encrypted.
And if it's got an adblocker on that network you soon notice if it's not connected since all the ads come flooding in.
I too third Tailscale, since it is literally now saving me money because work has give us pretty darn fast WiFi albeit with a nanny filter which the above exit node breaks you out of so I now don't pay for as much data on my cellular plan.
That'd be dependent on your works IT policy and I can hear the resounding NO from my IT dept here at home :/
However if they're fairly lax, you could install it on anything from a Pi to a spare laptop.
Besides like I say it's now saving me money, I've also got the bonus of having off site backup storage at a family member's now since I gave them an old Pi4 of mine, setup the arrrr stack/Jellyfin/Jellyseerr etc and they love me so much now because of that, I don't think they'd even notice they're secretly part of my 3.2.1 backup solution (since they also get my remote IT support + their adblocker on their phone via Tailscale anywhere) ;)
I had set up this configuration around 2016 and found it a little clunky. I called it a SkyHole. It was great, and now we have the ability to install DNS profiles on most phones, or configure DNS profiles for PCs such that I use a (“free”) commercial provider and get ad blocking which takes care of 99% of the noise, and don’t have to fuss about with maintaining a dedicated device.
Ditto, NextDNS has been great for that. I tried their paid version as well but downgraded since I never ran into that many queries. I've heard good things about quad9 too, which I think is European.