My phones use my home ad blocker everywhere now, and the only place it broke was at home
Worth the hassle, as long as my ISP holds up.
Over the past year, the author tested various DNS servers, all of which effectively blocked ads and filtered trackers while at home. However, when switching from home Wi-Fi to mobile data or public Wi-Fi, the protection against ads and trackers disappeared. To resolve this, the author set up a self-hosted encrypted DNS server called AdGuard Home (AGH) and pointed their phones at it, allowing the filtering service to work consistently across all locations.
After some trial and error, the author settled on AGH with DoH via Quad9. The setup involved exposing AGH through a public IP address and TLS certificate on NPM (Nginx Proxy Manager). The author then configured the phones to use the home server for DNS requests using built-in encrypted DNS settings. The DNS flow changed from carrier DNS to the static IP, ONT (ON Terminal), ER605 (Ethernet Router), NPM, and AGH, ensuring ads and trackers were blocked.
The author tested mobile data on both phones, and everything worked as expected. However, when connecting back to home Wi-Fi, both phones lost internet due to a double NAT setup causing a hairpin connection timeout. To fix this, the author rewrote the domain using AGH's native DNS rewrite, pointing both ".dns." and "*.dns." to the server's local IP address.
This setup required trade-offs, such as setting up a secondary public DNS server for failover and managing AGH restarts monthly to pick up renewed certificates.
Written by urgent.news from XDA Developers's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
