

If you know how DNS works, you may skip this part, but as a quick refresher. Its primary goal is to provide your network with a mechanism to actively block certain requests that websites you visit make – in this case, requests for adverts, malware, or various other malicious things. In short, AdGuard Home is much like your run-of-the-mill browser ad blocker, but rather than being a plug-in on your favourite web browser, AdGuard Home is a fully-fledged server application which runs on a separate machine somewhere on your network (or perhaps even on a VPS you own). It's a self-hosted variant of AdGuard's own subscription DNS service. However, after having spotted some discussion on our Discord server-and coincidentally during our rebooted podcast-about a new player on the field, I decided to give AdGuard Home a go. Like most people (I assume), I stuck to browser plugins like AdBlock Plus and uBlock Origin.

While many members of the LinuxServer.io team currently use PiHole for their ad-blocking needs, I was relatively late to the game having never used a network-level DNS blocker.
