So I've been in Thailand for almost about 5 years now and I must say I really enjoy it.
Whenever I'm planning on a move from one home to other I always plan the internet first, the day we move I set an appointment with my ISP and I do this well in advance so that I never have to use my phone's data. But that's not the thing I want to talk about here.
My setup currently consists a router with modem built in which was provided by ISP directly, it's a decent router with 2 access points, one with 2.4 Ghz and one with 5 Ghz both have separate passwords, I use 5 Ghz but when I'm out of range I'm still able to use 2.4 (in case I'm out in the garden)
What I did a while back is setup pihole in my raspberrypi which was sitting around doing nonsense IoT project I did before.
Instead of pointing DNS to my rpi from each devices and having to tell guests that they can use my DNS instead of ISP dns (some people would ask what a DNS was, and that's a different conversation), I rather changed my router settings so that the settings which router provides all devices already contains my pihole dns.
This means, any device connecting to my WiFi automatically uses my DNS provider, here I can block websites, but I've done adblocking, this helped me a bunch because phones or smart TVs don't have adblocking capability that I know of. I don't do certain website blocking but I can if I wanted to.
Now because I'm using my own DNS, and Thailand's ISP does a dns filtering blocking of websites (sites that are banned in thailand), those still work! Without the use of VPN, and when the guests come they're surprised and ask if I have built-in VPN on router, I say no (they can check whatismyip and get info)
I didn't realize having your own DNS is awesome, but it totally is, and I recommend you doing the same SPECIALLY if your country does DNS blocking.
Top comments (4)
I had issues with LG TV using PiHole. Some sites/YouTube wasn't working at all.
Also phones had the same problem. I had to switch to LTE
sorry to hear that, personally never had that issue, I had a different issue with LG TV (the 65" one) though, they use dlna cast protocol instead of chromecast understandably, but the specs are very difficult to find/understand, stackoverflow isn't enough, I had to research about 3 months to produce PR of only less than 20 lines combined in 2 or 3 repositories :D to finally solve it.
I can try and help you with PiHole if you're interested though :) when you said it wasn't working at all, do you mean it failed to block ads? Or it wasn't able to resolve URLs? First thing to test is without phone and just test your DNS setting from your PC.
If PC works fine and also blocks ads (just need to really verify if it's using DNS or not), then we can debug why phone/TV didn't work.
it had problems with both. On sites that worked I've seen ads - but that I could report from PiHole admin panel.
Other times it didn't resolve URL and I was trying to fix that but my wife wasn't happy and after some time I've decided to turn it off.
For now I don't have time for that as I'm travelling a lot, but I'd love to make it work some day :)
that's sad, my recommendation would be to set that up with separate access point, my router has 2 access point, or even separate for lan, and once you have success then you can go for everything,
also not blocking ads sounds like you're block urls wasn't populated which was true in my case, I had to find some github url where they had listed urls to populate and it'd block all those.