Comment by ripdog

8 hours ago

That's something people should run themselves. I run Adguard Home on my router. Unlike the main Adguard product, Adguard Home is fully FOSS. It's been rock-solid for me, and improves on pi-hole in various ways - like full IPv6 support.

  > That's something people should run themselves. I run Adguard Home on my router. 

I'll second this. People should really be flashing their routers. OpenWRT is simple enough that if you're on HN I think you'll easily be able to do it. And like most routers, you set it up and forget it.

But you'll also get a bunch more benefits from OpenWRT, to make it worth your while.

  - I was able to buy a router for <$100 that was WiFi 7 capable (W1700K[0]) and had better hardware than most consumer routers. You can find plenty of cheaper routers that are flashable and more capable.
  - Adguard Home
  - Split tunneling/VLANs: Since we're talking Mullvad, you can put devices behind Mullvad on a VLAN. So activate Mullvad by changing SSIDs.
    - Trivial to put IOT devices on a VLAN (can make one directional too so you can access from your main network but they can't reach back. I throttle everything IOT)
  - Tailscale
  - QoS (Control the speed and prioritization of different connections)
  - It's a fucking computer, you can even run shell scripts

[0] You don't need something like this unless you're getting >1Gbps from your ISP. Big thing I wanted is the 2 10G ports.

It's probably the software I trust the most on my network to 'just work', and with the local caching I can use slower upstream dns providers and still have sub 1ms average latency (no performance worries by excluding google and cloudflare). I don't use it for dhcp, but it is a good fit that it's available as well. Couldn't be happier.

I use Mullvad's adblocking DNS server on my phone which is not always behind my home router.

I could, but DoH/DoT seems very involved to run yourself, and sometimes I need to give a recommendation to someone less tech-savvy.

  • I'd argue you don't need to run DoT/DoH yourself if it is just for your local network.

    Setting up a local resolver, such as a Pi-Hole or Unbound on a firewall can serve unencrypted responses to your devices. Those resolvers in turn can use DoT/DoH with their upstream resolvers to encrypt the requests that go through untrusted networks on the Internet.

    This is the best of both worlds, the simplicity of unencrypted DNS while encrypting traffic where it matters.

  • I stopped recommending anything I host myself for those people. When it breaks I'm the support team, and I'd rather not be. NextDNS free tier is what I give them now, takes two minutes, and I never hear about it again.