unifios-utilities VS dnscrypt-proxy

I just purchased the unifi express and I have been researching its capabilities and more specifically ad blocking functionality. I have found that people are complaining about the ad blocking abilities not being very granular and referring to unifios-utilities and running something like pi hole or adguard as an alternative. Can I safely assume that these options will be available to the unifi express?

https://github.com/unifi-utilities/unifios-utilities <- this cannot be more simple to digest. Stop spreading FUD (and learn to code if you still don't understand how Github works and what is linked)

Install on boot script: https://github.com/unifi-utilities/unifios-utilities/tree/main/on-boot-script

(https://github.com/unifi-utilities/unifios-utilities)

Not natively but they run dnsmasq so you can use unifios-utilities with an on-boot-script to modify dnsmasq’s config and add whatever records you need, including wildcard

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I tried installing the RPM from the Fedora repos but it's out-of-date and there were no instructions on how to get it operational, so I went with the manual approach as per their wiki: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