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Comment by ronjouch | Hacker News Reader

Also, owners or routers able to run OpenWRT (which is actively maintained and in great shape since the merge with LEDE), you have access to several packages providing the same technical solution (DNS-based blocking). As far as I know, the most common and maintained is https://github.com/openwrt/packages/tree/master/net/adblock/... .

Super easy to install, full-featured, lots of lists to pick from, auto-updates lists, no need for an additional device, and you will benefit from router features produced by the openwrt community and maybe unavailable in your router proprietary firmware. Much recommended.

If that sounds attractive and it sounds like a good opportunity to change your crumbling unpatched router, the question "what's today's good cheap router running openwrt without trouble?" is frequently answered by https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/ :) .

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Owners of Ubiquiti routers can use this Pi-Hole guide [1]

[1] https://community.ubnt.com/t5/EdgeRouter/DNS-Adblocking-amp-...

On similar note there are scripts which will enable host-based ad blocking via DNS for other open source router firmware like DDWRT, Tomato, Asus WRT etc.[1]

But I presume Pi-hole has automatic updates to lists, data visualisations, better community support than the routers with open source firmwares which are often quite bug-ridden (not to belittle the effort though).

[1]:https://wiki.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Ad_blocking

> "data visualisations"

Those visualizations on the pi-hole look great indeed!

> "Pi-hole has automatic updates to lists, [...] better community support than the routers with open source firmwares which are often quite bug-ridden (not to belittle the effort though)."

OpenWRT/adblock auto-updates lists too, and I can't speak for DD-WRT or Tomato, but I've been pleasantly surprised by the support and quality I met using OpenWRT. About support, my few questions got answered quickly on their forum and r/openwrt. On the software quality side, apart from the UI being slow (which seems reasonable, it's running on a cheap router), sometimes complicated by lots of options (but at least they're available, and an effort is usually made to hide the exotic options under an "Advanced" tab), and blandly bootstrap-y, I don't remember hitting any bug.

Thanks, my experience is with DDWRT & Tomato; though the developers had done a great job at bringing features found in expensive routers to cheap ones the bug fixes (especially security vulnerabilities) elude older models.

Where as 100$ routers with factory firmware nowadays get security updates quite regularly.

Curious about anyone's experience with adblock for OpenWRT.

I use Pi-hole now, and it works great. The one feature that I use quite a lot is the ability to disable it for a short period of time -- when I'm shopping for something, Google ads are sometimes actually useful!

I'd say I use that feature about once a month. That's the sum value of advertising for me.

OpenWRT's adblock package has a "Suspend" button too. Also, domain whitelisting.

OpenWRT ships with dnsmasq. You just need to edit /etc/hosts to have all the unwanted domains resolve to 0.0.0.0

I like to get my host list from https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

That's interesting, Where do you see relevant Google Ads while shopping; is it on some product review blogs?

Did you check the 'Shopping' tab of Google search?

One example I've run into...

When you google search for something (like say a product or service that you want to purchase), you'll see a couple ads at the top of the results.

Pi-hole usually prevents most ads from even displaying, but those always show up. If the ad was useful and you want to click through, it will generally block the request. I think the click through sends you to doubleclick or something.

I've never disabled pi-hole in that situation, but there have been times when it was an annoyance because the ad was actually relevant.

Understood, I think Google features those products in the shopping tab. But the results may vary depending upon the country you're in as I think they ran into some trouble for that in EU.

pfSense based routers can use pfBlockerNG which can be installed from the Package Manager.

Took a bit of effort to set up but it works great and is mostly set-it-and-forget-it.

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