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# Replacing my pi-hole with Ad Guard Home
- URL: https://thibaultmilan.com/replacing-my-pi-hole-with-ad-guard-home/
- Published: 2020-10-03T19:57:47.000Z
- Updated: 2020-10-03T19:57:47.000Z
- Description: I was using pi-hole for a couple of months / years but had to reinstall it every once in a while because of gravity being corrupted at some point so I decided to replace it and find a solution on how to use this kind of tool on my Android phone when at home too.
- Author: Thibault Milan
- Tags: #Import 2026-06-21 19:35

Nobody likes ads. But they are EVERY-FUCKING-WHERE nowadays, sadly. I was using the [adGuard browser extension](https://adguard.com/en/adguard-browser-extension/overview.html?ref=thibaultmilan.com) for chrome (but it's available for all browsers) for a long time and tried [pi-hole](https://pi-hole.net/?ref=thibaultmilan.com) project to clean my entire network at home.

The idea is simple. On a raspberry pi (on any other computer but a raspberry pi zero is 20€ and powered by USB and so tiny I can hide it somewhere and power it with my tv USB port or my router ...), you install a piece of software which is doing a proxy for DNS resolution. It looks on each request, compare it to a list of known ad platform or malware domain names. If it matches, it replies with an empty response; otherwise, it forwards it to the DNS of your choice ([Google Public DNS](https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns?ref=thibaultmilan.com) for me, because Cloudflare had much more ethics issues than Google regarding DNS poisoning and what they are doing with your data).

Sadly, pi-hole seems to have some issues when it refreshes the list periodically, ending with a corrupted database and failing to answer DNS requests from your devices on your network. So I had to reinstall it from scratch and reconfigure everything on my raspberry every month or so. At some point, I stop doing it.

But a couple of weeks ago, I noticed on Twitter a discussion about someone ditching pi-hole for [adGuard Home](https://adguard.com/en/adguard-home/overview.html?ref=thibaultmilan.com), which is basically the same idea but a product made by adGuard themself. You can also install it directly on your mac or pc if you want, but since they are not always on, in my case, I went for the install on the raspberry pi. Which was super easy:

1. Install the raspberry as you would do for any regular project. Flash your card with the `raspian headless` (light), enable SSH access (just put a `ssh` file on the root of sd card) and configure your `wpa_supplicant.conf` at the root too.
2. Follow [the installation steps](https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/wiki/Raspberry-Pi?ref=thibaultmilan.com), which are mainly copy-pasting two snippets of code. One is to download and unzip the program, the second to install and register it as a service (so it will run when you reboot your raspberry pi).
3. Open the browser to `your-raspberry-pi-IP:3000` and follow the little wizard. That's it!

Then you make your router always give the same IP to your raspberry pi and use it as a DNS resolver on your devices. On a computer, it's easy. On iOS, it's kind of too. But on Android 9 and above, it isn't very easy. Android 9 and above let you specify dedicated DNS on each network you are using, but you need a primary server and secondary server on both IPV4 and IPV6, which you don't have with this method 🙁.

But it also introduced VPN APIs, which can be used by apps to create a local VPN on your phone and do whatever they want with the entire traffic, like just handling the DNS request to some resolver you decide 😃 . After a quick search on the internet, I found some apps doing this but also spying on you or asking for a subscription to work ... like ... why? They don't even provide DNS resolving services, so ... WTF ?!

Then I found [DNS Changer - Lilly](https://t.co/b8DuwmxwJl?amp=1&ref=thibaultmilan.com), made by [AYKUT ÇEVIK](https://aykutcevik.com/?ref=thibaultmilan.com), on the only purpose of being able to use services like AdGuard with a free of ads experience. And I cannot thanks him much for his work on this app. It even features a quick setting tile to turn on and off the DNS redirection, which is very useful for me since my DNS resolver is just accessible from home.