Pi-Hole: Ad blocking at the network level

[jimborae]

Hmm. My personal view is that fancy WiFi routers are rarely worth the money.


If you are feeling brave, and are handy with a soldering iron, the HH6 can be reflashed with LEDE/OpenWRT. Underneath the horribly dumbed down UI there is a not too shabby WiFi router trying to get out.

In most instances I'd agree however the Asus ones around £100-150 tend to be very good once flashed with AsusWRT Merlin firmware. Having said that I'll soon be replacing my Asus RT-AC 87u with an Ubiqiti EdgeRouter Lite and hooking my BT Whole Home directly into that.

[EtheAv8r]

Hmm. My personal view is that fancy WiFi routers are rarely worth the money.
.

thanks for that, my experience with the new setup seems to bear this out. I am getting quite a number of disconnect/reconnect outages, which is probably not a co-incidence.

Yesterday my internet dropped to a crawl, 4.5mps rather than my usual 68-70mps. Called BT who were VERY helpful, ran tests and requested I plug BT HH6 back in, which I did and speed returned to 70mbs.

They then held on the line whist I went back to the Asus/Vigor setup and again speed was back to 70mbs. so it seems I could/should have stayed with BT HH6 and run DHCP on the Pi-Hole and saved quite a bit of dosh.


What are the benefits of switching the Asus router to Merlin firmware? is it really worth doing?

[matts-uk]

thanks for that, my experience with the new setup seems to bear this out. I am getting quite a number of disconnect/reconnect outages, which is probably not a co-incidence.

Ultimately, the problem you are up against is WiFi transmit power is tightly regulated. As WiFi access point technology is fairly mature, the difference between the poorest quality radios and highest quality radios is trivial. Multipath (MiMo) radios and high gain antennas can increase coverage a bit. Overall however, the system is usually bottle-necked by the client device radios, where form factors limit the efficiency of the antenna and sensitivity of the receiver. To significantly increase the range of the network, you need more radios, so clients are closer to access points...But as soon as you add a 2nd access point, you create a potential for issues at Layer 2 of the protocol stack.

so it seems I could/should have stayed with BT HH6 and run DHCP on the Pi-Hole and saved quite a bit of dosh.

You could have spent the dosh much more effectively. Improving coverage has become a great deal easier since the mesh networking technology became affordable, only in the last 18 months. A Tenda MW6 triple pack is currently a steal.

What are the benefits of switching the Asus router to Merlin firmware? is it really worth doing?

It's an OpenWRT/Lede derivative (fork). Unlikely to provide much in the way of increased speed or coverage, but will uncover many of the capabilities that home router manufacturers hide from you. Personally, I would leave the Asus as stock, e-bay it along with the Draytek modem, use the money to buy a mesh (so called Whole Home) kit.

[DDY]

I thought I'd give this ago today. I set up Pi-hole on an Ubuntu virtual machine on a Windows host and configured the router to intercept DNS requests etc...

Everything was working perfectly.

Except my Android phone was still showing ads.

After an entire afternoon of troubleshooting... I remembered to turn off mobile data...

The whole time, Pihole was blocking ads over Wifi/LAN like a champ, and the phone was then loading blocked elements over mobile data.

Being on PAYG, over the course of an afternoon I spent £3, purely downloading ads.

fml

[peterb]

Whoops - glad you got it working! Iphone seems to download load all data over wi-fi if its available and ignore mobile. I guess android will try to get ads by whatever means it can (thanks Google)

[spacein_vader]

Whoops - glad you got it working! Iphone seems to download load all data over wi-fi if its available and ignore mobile. I guess android will try to get ads by whatever means it can (thanks Google)

Anything with Android 8 or higher will try to use mobile data and Google's DNS I blocked by other means.

[ChaosSystem]

In other news I'm getting severe grief from SWMBO because and I quote:

"Whenever I click on the top search result and ads it doesn't work. Something about Google Lead Services denied."
.

Try whitelisting the following:
dartsearch.net
googleadservices.com
www.dartsearch.net
www.googleadservices.com
clickserve.dartsearch.net

[876HX]

Tried it and its quite impressive. Thanks for sharing and i am going to make a donation to the creator.

[mikerr]

Well behind the scenes pi-hole is basically dnsmasq with a quick install script and fancy web server for statistics,

If for whatever reason you want to do it manually on any linux box (including a pi):

https://lowendbox.com/blog/host-your...more-ad-block/