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Since pretty much all the reviews here are glowing I'll offer up an alternative. If you want what they are selling, then it does work quite well.. but there ar
by Urgo 6y ago
Since pretty much all the reviews here are glowing I'll offer up an alternative.
If you want what they are selling, then it does work quite well.. but there are drawbacks.. one primarily.. that made me end up not using it for my whole network and only on my ipad when I don't want ads in a game.
As mentioned in other comments, you can whitelist domains, but unlike the whitelist in ublock or something in your browser, this means you need to know the exact ad server domain/domains. For example if I want ads on for certain websites to help support or troubleshoot my own site then I'm unable to do that or if the wife needs to see an ad in her game to get gems, you have to dig through the logs to find out what ad server its calling.. or set up another profile to not block any ads.
In short, you're not whitelisting the domain you're visiting, you need to whitelist every domain that website might call too. Perhaps most people are okay with then and if so then ignore :)
Another thing I didn't like, which I mean makes sense, but in order to label a device you need to run their client. I had set up nextdns on my router which worked great, but if I wanted different devices to have different rulesets they each needed to run the nextdns client. So good luck knowing which smart device is calling what because you're not going to be installing the client on your Alexa. One other downside of this which honestly I probably could have fixed was their client broke WSL network connections so on my primary device I ended up operating in logged out mode.
That said, I might end up giving it another shot at some point but running on a very limited set of rules rather then the pretty comprehensive rulesets I had enabled. I did like how it blocked the device telemetry calls.. perhaps that is all I need to block and then handle everything else client side.
Hope this helps someone!
- jmathai 6y agoCurrently using OpenDNS Family Shield and giving NextDNS a try. Re labeling devices: I set up descriptive hostnames and static LAN IPs on my router for all my devices (including smart ones). The NextDNS interface reports traffic using those hostnames without me having to run clients on any of my devices. I'm curious how the ad blocking will work. I was running adblock on my router but had to disable it because a few legitimate sites were being blocked (i.e. school sites my kids needed access to). I'm hoping NextDNS provides easier to use controls and UI that would let me keep ad blocking enabled.
- ianmcgowan 6y agoDid you install the clients or do anything in the setup to get that? I can see client hostnames where the client software is installed, but just my external IP for all others. It doesn't seem possible with just IPv4/Router config. Are you using IPv6 or DoH?
- nullify88 6y ago> Another thing I didn't like, which I mean makes sense, but in order to label a device you need to run their client. I hope I understood you correctly. A feature recently introduced (Or perhaps I just recently noticed) is the ability to label devices without using their clients, you can do this by prefixing your unique DNS endpoint with the label and terminating it with a hyphen. Eg, Phone-xxxxx.dns.nextdns.io