Goals for My Network - Your Input/Suggestions Solicited

[rickw]

I have a fairly simple home network. I want to make it better.

I have successfully installed OpenWRT on my routers.

Goals

1. Create a reliable wired and wireless network on a single SSID using both 2.4 and 5GHz radios with fast/seamless roaming (or at least good wifi speed almost anywhere in the house/garage).

2. Minimize browser ad clutter/annoyance.

3. Minimize the number of devices ignoring/bypassing local DNS.

Proposed Hardware/Software (already have)

1. One router and two dumb access points all running OpenWRT. (House has Cat5e network wiring. Several unmanaged switches are in use.)

2. Pi-hole running on Raspberry Pi with Unbound. DNS query logging per client.

3. Configure hardware to force DNS queries through Pi-hole.

I have a working network/router (non-OpenWRT) and Pi-hole now and that is my default/backup system. What I'm proposing here, and working on now, would replace that system.

I have already spent many, many hours reading as much as I can, and trying to get some of this working without much success. I always have to give up and go back to the backup system. I am finding that many tutorials, despite being well-written, may be outdated and/or no longer work.

For example, there is this one:

Running PiHole on OpenWrt (x86/RPi) using Docker - Tutorial/Experiences

I have recently been able to run PiHole on OpenWrt x86 using Docker. Before OpenWrt I had an Ubuntu Docker host which was running the PiHole container. The PiHole container was attached to the LAN network using Linux/Docker macvlan. Also for the Ubuntu Host to be able to ping the PiHole container, a workaround posted on stackoverflow was applied which creates a linux macvlan that the container uses. Giving PiHole an IP Address different than the IP Address of the host greatly simplifies the setu…

The first thing I found was that the code to disable ipv6 does not work. Are recent releases of OpenWRT not compatible with that code? I assume it worked in the past?

Another example would be:

Force All DNS Queries Through PiHole with OpenWRT

I could not get this working either. Dig output/results were the same with or without these configuration changes to OpenWRT. Should this work, or are recent changes to OpenWRT/Pi-hole causing this not to work? Is there another/better way to accomplish this?

Are my goals achievable for a non-expert (but reasonably tech savvy person)? I really don't want to abandon the OpenWRT approach. I just don't know where to look or what to try next. Any comments or suggestions would be great. Thanks in advance!

[trendy]

Regarding the first link with the post in Openwrt forum, it really depends on which version you are running and which router compared to the version of the writer.
For the second link, it is not affiliated to OpenWrt forum or wiki, so I cannot comment.

[ahasbini]

Like @trendy explained, docker is needed for running pihole on OpenWrt, so you'll probably need a hardware that supports docker and has enough storage (about 400MB), and so it's mostly RPi and x86 hardware. On the other hand, there is adguardhome (which is a smaller) provided in the repos/softwares.