sophos on mini pc

Blocking ads is a great idea, but not all sites are happy with that idea and start blocking users because their home security device blocks ads. My wife has two forums which started backing users because of ads. There must have been a rebellion because the ads are still blocked and my wife can access the sites.

Ian

I will really try it tomorrow! I m sick of ads. (and honestly, due to the extreme number of ads, i kinda limit the use of certain aps, like YT).

I might recommend using an external DNS server that does ad-blocking such as Pi-hole or Adguard DNS. This way ads are blocked on all devices as long as the devices are pointing to the external DNS server that Pihole or adguard is running on.

DNS filtering can be bypassed on devices if users change the DNS settings to Google/Cloudflared ect., so this is why it's not a common practice to rely on something like Pi-hole for adblocking since it can be bypassed. 

If you want to avoid the hassle of setting up your own DNS server, then you could just pay for the adguard DNS service and use the AdGuard DNS servers as the DNS forwarders within the firewall settings.

Amodin said:

ou need to get Pi-Hole up and running!

I just tried this out today, I have it installed on my Proxmox server.  It is specifically designed for this, and it's great. 

Congratulations. Are you using unbound, or the built-in forwarders? Or did you point it back to the XG? I'm curious how others have it set up.

I have Pi-Hole set up as my primary DNS, and XG as the secondary.  All of my DNS local hostnames are already built in XG, and I didn't want to do that all over again.  So, all I had to do was use Conditional Forwarding to get my DNS names to work.  I disabled all of the web ads categories I built in XG to let Pi-Hole do all the blocking. 

So far so good, between it and uBlock extension on my clients.  Of course it doesn't block those pain in the butt Youtube embedded ads, but I dont see anything else coming through yet.

Try the adguard extension. You might get better results. It works on Android devices too and gets more reviews than uBlock origin.

Oh I don't have issues anymore via web pages, but the YT app itself will still allow them through, and that is a really rough thing to block because of the embedding that Google does.  It will eventually get to the point of straight up blocking anything Google, lol.  They have a filter for it in Pi-hole you can add. ;) 

I'm actually glad that I set up Pi-hole, because I started seeing this DNS name on my local network (wpad.local.name) that I had not ever seen before or configured.  After doing some digging on this, it's best to disable any proxy settings from whatever browser is pushing that hot mess.