dnscrypt-proxy VS nextdns

There is more than one way to do this but I have decided to use dnscrypt-proxy. We will not be using dnscrypt for the dnscrypt protocol though you could elect to use that as the underlying DNS protocol. dnscrypt-proxy lets's us use a SOCKS5 proxy through which the DNS queries will be sent. We will use a Tor SOCKS5 proxy here. You can choose which protocols should be enabled and which ones should be disabled. There are two points:

I tried installing the RPM from the Fedora repos but it's out-of-date and there were no instructions on how to get it operational, so I went with the manual approach as per their wiki: https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy/wiki/Installation-linux

This is awesome, thanks -- going to look into that now. I found SmartDNS interesting and thought I would share it, it's pretty simple to setup. I can see why it's Chinese focused, they have "interesting" internet access over there :-).

I have been looking into DNS quite a bit lately (Unbound, etc), as DNS lookup performance has been pretty subpar lately. I'm in Perth, Australia, and we're pretty remote so our latency is meh at best, and Cloudflare performance has been all over the shop lately, I think they're having issues in WA). DNS can also cause really routing issues here sometimes as we get better latency to Singapore than Sydney, so we might get shunted off to SG.

I've also been using dnscrypt-proxy2 (https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy) for a while, but the above issues with Cloudflares DNS is what triggered me to look into other options.

I use a min-cache-ttl of 15 minutes, which seems to work well.

Thank you for sharing this tip about, looking into this now :).

Sure. I run dnscrypt_proxy behind a pihole. https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy

I've tried hosted Pi-Hole and AdGuard Home. They are good as long as I'm around to fix stuffs. Then I tested something which can be global (home) and also for individual devices -- Control-D, NextDNS, and Adguard DNS. All of them works pretty well. If I really have to choose, then it would be in the order of NextDNS > Control-D > AdGuard DNS. Affiliated with none, and have decided to subscribe to all three to further test them for this year.

https://controld.com

https://nextdns.io

https://adguard-dns.io

Okay but NextDNS' own homepage says it "blocks ads and trackers on websites and in apps" - https://nextdns.io

I first used Safari on Windows around 2006. Put me off forever.

You just need Firefox and the extensions that mean ads are never seen.

That said, take a look at https://nextdns.io

just run snort and get nextdns.io account and use those DNS servers to control your DNS.

I'm using NextDNS which can be integrated into TailScale MagicDNS. It works seamlessly. You may need to pay if you have a high usage rate. I pay for the Pro version but that's less than $30 CAD a year. I did have in house Raspberry PI and Pi-Hole DNS but it was a lot of work.

pretty much to the same effect of a pihole, yet you can get up and running in minutes. You can then configure wherever you please: your browser, your laptop, your phone, or even your router.

[0]: https://nextdns.io

Check out NextDNS. You can set recreation time and block things like YouTube and Instagram at all times of the day except during your recreation time. Mine for instance is between 6pm and 9pm. At all other times, I can have it blocked. They market this feature to parents, which I think is short sighted because it’s great for productivity and works much more effectively at the network level compared to blocking apps which, at least on iOS, are limited in their capabilities.

Update: So I can see in https://github.com/nextdns/nextdns/wiki that the nextdns CLI I set up in opnsense is DOH, but I swear this wouldn’t work the first time I installed it, hence why I set up DOT. So confused now lol!