Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

"Likewise, I just "opted into" into NextDNS a few days ago to block ads so I didn't have to set up a Raspberry Pi-hole."

This is a fantastic idea - I can't believe I never thought of this ...

I'm sorry to hijack, but about the nextDNS product ... how do they determine who is a paying customer ? Do you have to log your IP-space with them ?

I also have no idea, in the context of modern web browsing, how large or small 300,000 DNS queries per month is[1]. It seems quite large to me - as if even my entire household would never possibly produce 300k DNS queries each month ... but perhaps I underestimate how many queries modern web pages produce ?

Can I run my own very simple local resolver and use NextDNS as my upstream such that only one of my systems (my DNS server) is talking to NextDNS ? This would allow me to use NextDNS globally without them tracking me all over the world ...

[1] https://nextdns.io/pricing

View on HN

>I also have no idea, in the context of modern web browsing, how large or small 300,000 DNS queries per month is[1]. It seems quite large to me - as if even my entire household would never possibly produce 300k DNS queries each month ... but perhaps I underestimate how many queries modern web pages produce ?

I just looked at my NextDNS stats dashboard for the previous 6 hours and it says 5900 queries. I was surprised by that high number. The intuition is to count in terms of manual clicks on urls but the part I underestimated is how "chatty" many web pages are with Javascript (e.g. analytics, ads, etc). In my case, I see about 1000 hits in 6 hours to just 2 urls: msh.amazon.com, content.googleapis.com.

Based on being awake 16 hours a day over 30 days, I extrapolate ~540,000 queries per month. This is for 2 people with no kids at home at the moment.

If my modest internet usage is ~540k queries per month, I'm guessing NextDNS definitely did the spreadsheet modeling to come up with 300k threshold so most people easily pass it after mid-month and therefore enticed to pay for the service to continue the ad blocking. When I get to that point, I'll re-evaluate the idea of setting up a Raspberry Pi-Hole. I really don't want to mess with hardware.

Maybe if I'm more aggressive with a local "hosts" file to locally block more sites to 127.0.0.1, I can drastically cut down the number of DNS queries hitting NextDNS.

FWIW, I recently set up pi-hole on a pi zero, and it was really pretty straightforward, even setting it up headless

I tried this route as well first, since I had an Pi 3B lying around not being used. However, after having the Pi-Hole FTL service crashing multiple times a week and completely stopping the whole network from getting Internet access I ditched it. This was using the latest Pi-Hole version on latest Raspian. Some searching the Internet turned up some results about memory usage and such but the logs never showed anything actionable and I gave up on troubleshooting it and just went for NextDNS instead.

Pi-Hole is very easy and very polished. It ends up blocking almost 30% of all my dns requests.

You don't need a raspberry pi to run pihole...

I have it running in a vm on a machine that is on 24/7 anyways.

I installed dietpi as the OS and selected pihole in its install options. 10 min later it's up and running. No issues!

> I also have no idea, in the context of modern web browsing, how large or small 300,000 DNS queries per month is.

FWIW, here at home, my DNS servers are reporting a combined total of ~138k (from 21 unique clients) over the last (rolling) 24 hour period.

(Of course, mine probably isn't indicative of a "typical" American household when it comes to browsing habits and such.)

I'm the only one using my NextDNS configuration, and run about 100,000 queries a day. Granted, I have IPv4 and IPv6 setup, so each request is duplicated for both. If I only used IPv4, it would be closer to 50,000 each day.

They determine which configuration to use for you by the endpoint you've configured, whether it's the app or using their specific endpoint.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com