Nobody likes ads and in this
video we are going to be blocking them. And no, I'm not talking about
your typical web browser ad blocker, you can see I have mine paused
right here because I don't need it anymore. I'm talking about
something like AdGuard here. This is a DNS server that you
hook up and it will filter out IP addresses and domain names
associated with advertisements. So you'll basically be going
from something like this to this. Pretty nice. Another alternative to this is a
very popular application called Pihole. And I do have a separate video on
that that also is a Proxmox installation. So if you're interested in
checking out the differences and whatnot, you can check out that video as well. They're both great. They both work good. Both open source applications. You can see here I set it up yesterday. We already have 34,000 DNS queries
and of those 2,800 of them have been blocked. You get a lot of information
here including some general statistics, your top clients
which lists the IP addresses. And you can see there's a lot. This is network wide. So all the clients within my
home network are going to be using this. And then down here we
have the top query domains. We have the top
block domains, which gives you some information on
what they are and what they do. We have information
on the upstreams as well as the average response
time for those upstreams. And then we have
some other settings and stuff which we will go
into after the installation. Again, this is a Proxmox installation. And with Helper scripts,
this is going to be incredibly easy. You can see right here,
this is my current AdGuard instance. And we are just going to spin up
another one and go through the process here. If you don't know what Proxmox
is and you don't have it installed, there's two videos
that I made that I'd recommend. One is the best server or
home server operating systems. And I have another one
going over the installation process. Installing Proxmox is as
simple as any other Linux distribution. And speaking of Helper
scripts, we are using the Helper scripts. This makes it so painfully easy. They have a bunch of different ones too. So if you want to go
ahead and explore, you can. And in my own Proxmox instance, you could see I have Home
Assistant OS, Plex, and Emby all using these Helper scripts. And if we go back
over here, you could see all the categories
of everything they got. So media, photo,
lots of different things. They have NVR, DVRs, dashboards, just
a whole lot of everything that you'll need. But we are going to be focusing on ad
blocker DNS and AdGuard Home is right here. Do note that it's
always important when you run scripts or
anything that is automated. It's important to know
what you're actually running. Good thing if you
go ahead and view on GitHub here, they actually
have all the scripts here. So if we go to
install, you can see all the different .sh files
to all the different things they offer. So for example, if we
go to the MB install SH file, you can see the actual script that's
going to run everything that it's going to do, all the permissions it's going to
set, everything it's going to install, where it's pulling the
applications from and more. So it's always good to give that a quick scan before you go
ahead and install anything. So back to the helper scripts
here, we are going to go with AdGuard. Again, there's
Pihole and some other options. But in this one,
we're going to go with AdGuard*. And this is going
to install as a container. Containers versus
virtual machines on Proxmox use considerably
less system resources because they utilize the same kernel and whatnot. And we can see the default settings here. I'll show you how
you can change the default settings gives you a
brief overview of exactly what it is, what it does. So let's go ahead and copy this
bash script here and head over to Proxmox. So what you're going
to want to do is go to the instance in which
you want to have it installed on head over to the shell. And we're simply
going to paste in this command. Go and hit enter. When you do that,
you'll see this right here. This will create a new
AdGuard XLC would you like to proceed? Now here the default settings
for most people are going to be perfect. I will have them right here if
you're interested in checking those out. So if this works good for
you, you can just hit yes and continue. For me, I'm going
to go advanced because I do want to give it just a little bit more system resources. Use the spacebar
to select things continue. We are going to be using Debian 12. So let's go ahead and keep that selected. Tab down to OK. And let's use the latest version
of Debian bookworm and then continue. We're going to have
this as a unprivileged container. You can read about that
a little more if you'd like to. I'll leave some links in the description. Continue and then we
have our root password here. This is for SSH access. So go ahead and type in something
here that's moderately strong and secure. Continue. Another container ID. You can put whatever you
want as long as it's not taken. 104 is going to be fine for me. Host name AdGuard is fine. This is a temporary instance. So I'm just going to
call this adguard-new. And then from there, let's continue. Now the disk size in gigabytes. AdGuard really doesn't
take up a whole lot of room. And you can see here after logging, after 90 days of statistics, it only
takes up two megabytes. Seven days of query logs is 53 megabytes. So really not a whole lot of space. Regardless, two is pretty small. I have a lot of room on here. I don't want to have to
ever really think about it again. So let's go ahead and go with four. So continue from there. CPU cores. I'm going to give it two, just
so it's a little bit more powerful. And one is completely fine,
but let's go ahead and continue. Now RAM in the system. Now I can actually reference my
existing container here really quick. So if I go over here to AdGuard,
summary, let's see what it's using right now. So it's using a 35
megabytes of RAM and like none of the CPU. There's not a lot of clients on it right now, but, even then it's very, very low, hardly uses
any system resources at all. So realistically the 512
megabytes of RAM is going to be completely fine. Let's continue. You probably could even go a little less. And then select the bridge. The default in most
cases is what you're going to want. Unless if you really know your Proxmox instance and you have
multiple networks on it, then you might want to change this. So continue here. DHCP is going to be fine. Continue that's going to
automatically pull an IP address for it. For this, we're going to
leave it blank to keep the default. I don't use IPv6 on
my network, but I'm also not going to
disable it just in case if that changes in the future. MTU size, let's do
default for the DNS search domain. Let's leave that as our host. And for the IP,
let's also leave that blank for now to leave
it as host as well as the Mac address. Let's let it pull its own. Set a VLAN default,
enable root SSH access for this. We gave it a password, but I'm going to keep this disabled
because I could just access it through Proxmox directly. It's only going to be running the single service so I don't
necessarily have a reason to SSH into it. And then last but not least, we
are not going to be enabling verbose mode. And then let's
create the container so you could see all the
settings there that we picked. And then it's going to run through the process of pulling
the, we're actually creating the container, pulling the dependencies, installing the
software and applying our settings. And boom, we can see it
kind of popped up right there for us. It's using the helper scripts
and it's installing AdGuard home. So now we should be
able to access it through here. Let's go ahead and do that. Let's go ahead, give this a copy. I'll go ahead and pop it on this page. And there we go. So welcome to AdGuard home. First thing first, let's get rid of that light mode, go to
dark mode and get started here. So we have our
list and interfaces when in doubt, leave
everything here as the default, unless of course you have very specific reasons to change
some of the things that you are seeing here. So let's continue,
create our administrator account, give
yourself a pretty good password and we will go next. Here it has a little tutorial
on how to configure various devices. You're probably
going to want to go with the router if you want
this to be a network wide thing. But I'll show you
how to get back to that. So let's go ahead and hit
next and then open our dashboard. Ah, so let's go ahead and sign in here. Oh, why is it not saving? And it's up and running. We do have some settings here. So let's head over to settings. You have general settings, DNS
settings, encryption, client and DHCP settings. I'm going to leave documentation
down below so you can explore a lot of these. But one thing you might
want to do is change your DNS server. We could see in my
active instance here, the response time of the
default one is significantly more than something
like cloudflares at default. So to change it,
for example, if you wanted to change it to
cloudflare, you could use whatever you prefer to use. All we would do is go ahead and pop
that in here and then you can scroll down. We have a fallback. So for this, maybe we just use
Google's and then we're good to go. So you could test the upstreams. It's working. Apply. There we go. And again, we have more
things under like general settings. So you can use their security
service, their parental control service. You can set it to use safe search. There's a lot of
settings and whatnot that you could go
through and actually explore, customize, including encryption
settings, various client settings and more. So from there, if we go back over to the setup guide, we want
to actually be able to use this and there are
numerous ways to do this. You have Windows, macOS,
Android, iOS, DNS, privacy, as well as router. For example, if I
were, it doesn't say Linux here, but I can
still show you that regardless and doing it on
your specific devices, only going to have that
device accessing this DNS server that you set up, which will
not apply it to network wide coverage. But I'll show you
that in a second right after I connect this
computer specifically to it. So you can go ahead and test it
out and see if it's working for you. So I'm going to copy the IP
address for our AdGuard instance. And no matter what
operating system you're on, you're going to
want to head over to your settings and then go under network. If you're using a cable
for my instance, let's go Wi-Fi. Head over to my settings. And then for this,
it's under IPV4 and we have DNS. So I'm going to disable automatic. I'm going to paste in this
IP address and just the IP address. Apply that setting, close out. And if I head over to my dashboard and actually go to a
website that is absolutely wretched and ad-ridden, such as CNN.com. There we go. We can see we're
having some issues loading up some of these
ads, which is a very, very good sign. And now if we head over to my new
instance of AdGuard and let's go ahead and click this refresh statistics. And there we go. We can see that my only client
is the only device that I connected. We have 10 queries and there's
actually nothing blocked at the moment. And that is because I actually set my
main AdGuard home server through my router. So this is catching
it before this instance can. But on my main
instance, if we go over here and go to query
log, you can see here that we have a whole bunch of things blocked rather recently from
our local instance, which this is the IP address of the
computer I'm recording this on. And all of this is that CNN trash. Now going up here to the setup guide and actually using this as
your whole network wide DNS is going to require you to log into your modem, router,
whatever you happen to be using. In my case, I am using
Omada in the Omada controller. This is probably going to
look completely different for you. Basically just searching up your
router brand model and how to set custom DNS. For my instance, I need to go to my home. And then from there, go down to settings, went to my wired
network, my LAN, and this was what controls the LAN or
the main interface for my network. Give that an edit. And then right down
here, you can see DNS server. I switched it from auto to manual. And then I set it to the IP address
associated with my main ad guard instance. And now it filters
out all the ads on my network. So that's how you do it. I do recommend you
check out those Proxmox helper scripts,
especially if you're somebody who runs Proxmox, makes it really easy to go ahead and spin
some stuff up, really save you some time on manual
installations for various services. And yeah, again, I'll post links
down below to everything that I talked about. I do hope you have an
absolutely beautiful day and good bye.
