OpenWRT AdBlock vs. Pi-hole in 2021 - which is better?

General discussion
1

Hello together,

there are two “main” adblocking solutions available for the Turris Omnia: OpenWRT’s Adblock and Pi-hole.

It seems that OpenWRT Adblock is simply installed as an addon into /tmp-memory while Pi-hole needs to run in a LXC-container on an mSATA drive. However, which package is more “powerful” or reliable?

Do you prefer one over the other? :slight_smile:

Thank you very much in advance!

PS: The last discussion on this topic has taken place in 2017, so I guess there are some updates available.

2

I tried running the Pi-hole in an LXC for a while back before Adblock was well supported on TurrisOS and it worked, more or less. One of the issues I ran into though, is because it isn’t well integrated into OpenWRT, I would get issues with resolution from time to time.

Since Adblock now works seamlessly with kresd, the maintenance on it is trivial, though some of the lists I subscribe to occasionally block things like www.google.com.

Additionally, the overhead for running a Pi-Hole in an LXC in TurrisOS is quite a bit higher than just running Adblock.

I also keep my blocklist on persistent storage on my mSATA drive. I’m not sure that helps, but it might improve startup since it has the list already and doesn’t need an extra fetch on boot.

3

Thank you very much for your reply! :slight_smile:

Ah, it is possible to store the AdBlock-blocklist on the mSATA drive? I always thought that AdBlock doesn’t allow to store anything persistent, because most people seem to install it on /tmp?

4

I am a relatively new Omnia owner; since Nov. 2020. One of the (of many) reasons i bought my Omnia, was that I was considering running Pi-Hole on LXC. I did not even know about the existence of Adblock before I got the Omnia.

Discovering Adblock, i decided to try it first, and have been pretty happy with the results so far.

One thing to point out: you can always simply plug a Rasp Pie with Pi-Hole into an ethernet port on the LAN side and use it for DNS. Super cheap thing to do! so why not try Ad block first and if it does not meet your needs, a Pi-hole installed on a rasp pie is a quick and cheap upgrade.

5

“Backup Directory” on the “Additional Settings” tab.

6

Pi-hole.

  • Better community (blocklist/whitelist creation, general talks, awareness etc)
  • Blacklists can be adjusted to a device needs (for instance, only 5 of 10 blocklists applied for a device A while 10 blocklists applied for a device B)
  • Easier troubleshooting
  • Tutorials/docs
  • You know how much a device talks and where
  • Graphs
  • Management
  • And other more

I hijacked all DNS queries to Pi-hole (tested via dnsleak) and only native adblock solution I’d accept is found in pfSense (not sure about OPNsense) which also blocks IPs not just domains (pretty neat if you ask me).

OpenWRT’s adBlock is simply behind to me (but definitely not bad at all).

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