pfSense VS dnscrypt-proxy

One option is Firewalla Gold Plus, or you could buy a mini PC like it and run pfSense/OPNsense yourself.

Download and install pfsense as a virtual machine or partition: https://www.pfsense.org Configure it with the rules you want: https://youtu.be/VAGFGppSt74 Play with it, but be careful because it will block all traffic unless you check everything properly.

Another option is Firewalla, or buy a mini PC like it and run pfSense/OPNsense yourself. Two similar concepts, with the cost being either money or your DIY time. A lot of Firewalla users say that it's much easier for home use than pfSense/OPNsense, so you might find it worthwhile to spend a little more on it upfront and have to tinker less.

If you want firewall, I think you can use https://www.pfsense.org/ or https://opnsense.org/ , maybe running on an old PC or a Raspberry Pi. Not sure.

I've recently started using OPNsense. It's similar to pfSense, but seems to be considered a little more user-friendly.

For most router issues, I recommend people always put them in to dumb bridge mode and put a proper firewall like pfsense or opnsense as your gateway.

I have found that my historical average packet loss is about 0.02%. Something distinctly changed around 4/20 of this year, and now the average packet loss has gone up to 0.05% with spikes even higher, associated with periods of elevated ping times. It rarely did that before. Typically the IPv6 stack has more problems than v4 (especially an incident of packet loss on 4/28), and neither has been trouble-free since I started service in early 2020. My data comes from a pfSense installation.

I have done this using the Pfsense

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I tried installing the RPM from the Fedora repos but it's out-of-date and there were no instructions on how to get it operational, so I went with the manual approach as per their wiki: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