Hi all - please tell me if I’m doing this wrong:

My 12yo spends all day on YouTube shorts. I want to block it, but can only block YouTube entirely. Blocking for everyone would upset my 15yo, so I need per-client domain filtering.

That was easy on Pi-hole. But my Raspberry died and I heard praise for Adguard Home so now I run that as a Docker container.

  1. I can’t figure out how to block YouTube for only some devices. Is that not possible with Adguard? Claude gives me complicated nonsense; you can easily do better.

I want to ditch Adguard and go back to Pihole. The caveat is that I must let Pihole run the DHCP server, in order to get correct per-client blocking. That’s a pity, as I have a neat UniFi network set up.

  1. Can I get Pihole’s per-client blocking without Pihole as DHCP?

I don’t mind setting it all up in Pihole again because I know it works (it’s how I had it before the Raspberry died). But I would love to know if I am going about this the wrong way? Thank you!

  • Godnroc@lemmy.worldEnglish
    41·
    13 hours ago

    I run AdGuard as an addon to Home Assistant. If you want to stick to AdGuard you can go to Settings > Client Settings and set a per-client filtering rule. There is a tab in the client settings that can be used to filter specific services with a click. Setting an IP reservation for your child’s device in the DHCP settings of Unifi or your router will help ensure the IP address stays consistent.

    For the PiHole option, you don’t actually have to let the PiHole handle DHCP. You just need to tell your DHCP server what DNS server to use. For example, my router is .1 and my Raspberry PI is .2. The DHCP server, my router, tells all devices .1 is the gateway and .2 is the DNS server. You may also need to set these settings on the individual devices to prevent them from ignoring your DNS settings, but that can be done from the network settings. Avast had some safe networking “feature” that would force my DNS settings to be ignored, same with my Android phone.

    Of course, the downside to all of this is that any different device, different IP, device from a friend, or mobile data could bypass these restrictions. You may soon be in an arms race with your child and chances are they can get more clever that you can in a shorter time frame.