Wait, Pi-hole was your solution here?
> In the end, I kind of get the impression you're spending more mental energy on arguments against, rather than ask yourself why someone might find it useful.
I’m asking because I believe there are better ways. I could be called out for baiting or pushing a “the only way to win is not to play” for IoT and creepy apps/services agenda. Yet, NYT, FB and many others can still be viewed and signed into with a mobile browser. The experience may not be as nice but it still works and sends the right message to these corps. When creepy app/device/service is the only option I recoil and reassess.
Besides, DNS blacklisting isn’t perfect and requires a fair amount of tweaking depending on how many thingies you’re using it with. Any compromise you make for one affects all others. I think we have the same goal of “having your cake and eating it too” just different methods. Either way, we’re both expending constant energy and compromising.
And $35 for an OpenWRT router that does the same thing and also offers a web interface. Why pay more for a second standalone device?
Please clarify my understanding:
Wouldn't the OpenWRT router be a second standalone device as well?
Are you suggesting to use a $35 as the network's primary router?
If so, do you have a model to reccomend that you've had success with and an estimate of the load it could handle?
WLAN throughput is not so good, about 288mbps at 80mhz, but this was only one client device tested and not thoroughly because I don't know enough to diagnose bottlenecks. Regardless, this is more than enough to saturate my WAN connection - no issues with 6+ simultaneous wireless devices.
And something, something some rsync and ftp and you've got Dropbox. Yes, Pi-Hole is just dnsmasq with a pretty face, which is precisely why I use it. $50 for a Pi starter kit, and as soon as it hits your mailbox, you are about 20 minutes away from living the #adfreelife (and most of that 20 minutes will be redirecting your network after install. Where the hell are the docs for this router?).
Sometimes I'm content to manually tweak JSON files all evening. And sometimes I just want to plug it in and pretty much works out of the box. Ad filtering on my network falls into the unsexy latter bucket of "just give me something that requires a minimum of yak shaving".
Are you using apps/services on these devices that don’t offer an ad-free option
Yes, the NYT as one example. The app still has ads. I continue to pay for the NYT to support good journalism. I don't get to pick both, so I choose to continue to pay.
A device in my house went nuts and decided it needed to ping an NTP server 1K a night. Not anymore.
In the end, I kind of get the impression you're spending more mental energy on arguments against, rather than ask yourself why someone might find it useful. I could come up with quite a list of reasons with just casual thought.