Blocking Ads (Solutions)

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

I would like to implement something in OpenWrt to block ads, all the typical functional requirements met by the likes of AdGuard.

I'll be using a D-Link DIR2660 which has 256MB RAM and 128NAND. I have a spare D-Link to play whilst I get things configured correctly and I've already expanded the storage space via extroot config as I read that 128NAND would probably not be enough.

My main D-Link is hardly over utilised....I had a look at the stats for the last week and it reads as....

Processor:
Average <1.0%
Highest Peak on any of the cores is 6%

System Load is <1.0%

Average Free Memory is 161M
Average Used 38M

I can see there are some lengthy topics on the forum already about different solutions and was really after a pointer to say best going with xxxx and hence avoid reading all the lengthy content of the different solutions.

Seems like AdGuardHome, AdBlock, AdBlock-Fast and AdBlock-Lean are the main candidates.

I was thinking of just ploughing on with AdGuardHome but saw some posts saying its hungry on memory and the dashboards etc can compromise overall performance?

I quite like the idea of a dashboard and ok to accept a slight performance impact but also if solution is via CLI then so be it.

What do you think will AdGuardHome be a good option given my hardware etc

Thx

2

I quite like blocky

3

256mb doesn't have to be a lot, depending on the amount of blocked DNS names.

I'd probably use AdBlock or AdBlock-lean, to maximize the free RAM for the lists.

4

I’ve used Adblock since day 1 along with a separate dnsmasq blocklist, my preference being they are reasonably simple to implement, lean and have worked brilliantly for my use case. I personally find Adguard more than a little bloated @ 9.45MB and requires a higher learning curve to implement properly.

I have not looked at either Adblock-Fast or Adblock-Lean.

5

Is running on a raspberry pi an option? Ph-hole is spectacular in the role.

6

It is but quite like the idea of running it all on the OpenWrt platform

7

EDIT: I see that your router has an external USB so you could run pi-hole in a Linux container, even with the low memory. To give you an idea, I have Arch ARM running pi-hole (lighttpd) in a lxc on my MT6000 and it's only using 25 MB of RAM.

8

In my setup, I use PiHole and unbound on an orange pi.
OpenWRT rejects all UDP 53 traffic forwarded to wan.
Unbound is not used as a recursive resolver, but forwards everything to Adguard DNS (through DoT).
They are probably faster with updates in their database than the daily pihole update.

9

The D-Link DIR2660 is a MIPS architecture, do you know if this architecture supports LXC?

10

My archer a6 v3 is ramips and I see it:

# opkg list|grep lxc-start
lxc-start - 5.0.3-r1 - Utility lxc-start from the LXC userspace tools
11

I run my piholes in the cloud, for free, at Oracle.
Been doing it since 2019.

12

Thanks for the info all. I'm up and running now with AdBlock. All seems to be working well with 69000 block domains. No performance impact that I can tell. Will continue to investigate options.

I might come back to the LXC at a later date, seems interesting.

13

You can also use https-dns-proxy with the ad-blocking resolver, either a pre-set or a customizable one.

14

If OP needs to add USB storage for extroot (in order to run LXC), I would suggest getting Pi Zero with USB Stem to make it running in Ethernet gadget mode, better processing power, more resources (if you use Zero 2 then it's much better)