Once I had that in place, I had my own running instance! Configuration I then put it behind a reverse proxy (Nginx), to make the certificate management easier using the certbot-nginx plugin.

I just followed their instructions on how to have it installed. Installation was pretty straightforward and easy. So off I went and installed an instance of AdGuard Home. To me Pi-hole’s interface just looks a bit dated and tired. Another important thing to me is the way something looks (which is rather ironic since my own design and UI skills are pretty poor). I have a local instance of Step CA to be able to leverage ACME for certificates on my home network. The other issue that I had with Pi-hole is that Lighttpd (the web server for Pi-hole’s web interface), doesn’t play too well with ACME.

Pi-hole certainly covers all of them, but for encrypted DNS you have to install additional software.

Effective ad-blocking and malware blocking at a network level.

Enable encrypted DNS to DNS queries outside of my home network.

To be able to resolve local systems on my home network (I don’t want these to live outside of my network).

There are a few reasons why I run my own local DNS server: One such alternative that caught my eye was AdGuard Home. And it turned out that there were in fact several alternatives out there. I absolutely love trying out new things, so I was excited to see if there was. And it was at this point it got me thinking if there was any other possible solutions out there. I spent some time trying to troubleshoot why this was happening, but reached the conclusion it would be quicker and easier to just do a fresh install. But I was facing an issue with my instance where the web interface to it seemed to die every evening. It’s a great piece of software that works really well. Recently I had to rebuild my home network (I had issues with my router which meant I had to do a full reset on it), and as part of this effort I wanted to rebuild my local DNS server.

Adguard home local dns