Ads don't get blocked in Chrome - works fine in other browsers

Help
1

Expected Behaviour:

Should block ads in Chrome

Actual Behaviour:

Doesn't block ads in Chrome, but works fine in Edge and Firefox (on the same machine).

I have this behaviour on a laptop running a relatively fresh (2 weeks) install of windows 10 (everything is up to date).
It seems like it blocks ads fine at first (grey squares) but than it reloads and shows an ad.
I opened the same page with ads in chrome, firefox and edge parallel and only chrome has that issue. I have no clue what could cause this.

I have another laptop with Win10 and chrome and it works fine there.

BTW Pihole works fine on all of my other devices in the network. The DNS is directly provided by the wifi router.

3

Hi @anon55913113, please be more descriptive with your response... as it stands, you're not really saying anything :slight_smile:

5

Wow thanks, that was really helpful.

I disabled DoH and now it seems to work. I did never hear of it to be honest. Sometimes to only need the search term.

In fact I guess/hope this also solves another long lasting issue which I add with chrome not realiable connecting to my home assistant instance.

For other users that face the same issue:

Go to chrome://flags/#dns-over-https and disable Secure DNS lookups

1 Like
7

There is one thing that is still strange to me:

The other laptop with chrome also had the same setting for DoH. Is there any explanation why it blocked the ads fine there?

9

I think its bad that they show „default“ in the dropdown menu without telling which is the current default setting (for you on that machine).

Just one last noob question as this is still new to me.
Is it a security issue to disable that function?

11

While reading a bit more about DoH, I found some information about setting up the secondary DNS.
I always thought it would be a backup, but just found out that it is not.

The thing is I have pihole for my than a year and never had the feeling that is just the secondary DNS, which would mean no blocked ads. I used 8.8.8.8

This basically tells me that is only necessary to disable DoH in chrome when it detects a known DNS server.
So the reason why this might not be an issue for others is that they probably followed the suggestions in the link above and did not use a second DNS. In conclusion chrome should not use DoH.

I already deleted my secondary DNS server. However I’m a little bit concerned about what happens when my pihole instance goes down for some reason. No secondary DNS, no surfing websites. I know about the option to set up another pihole but this would be too high maintenance for me.

12

Before moving my pi-hole install to a docker container on my synology NAS, I ran it on the same Raspberry Pi 3b for 3 years, and the only downtime I had was due to me accidentally pulling the power cable out when I moved it once.

Obviously that's only anecdotal evidence that "everything will be fine" with just one!

13

I run it as an add-on in home assistant and had two sd card corruptions so far. So it would be bad in that case.

I just have to remember that I don’t have that secondary dns server any more if I run into related issues (no websites).

But I plan to switch to a nuc soon anyway.

15

Definitely worth looking at the docker container when you do. I've found it a very nice way of installing.

I've no experience with HA, so can't really suggest anything there. But if you're running on a Pi and are facing multiple SD card corruption issues, I would highly recommend checking your power adapter is up to scratch. One of the biggest causes of SD corruption i've seen is a power supply being too weak.

16

+1 on that.

I was going through about 1-2 cards a year because of bad (poor) power supply.

17

I use a genuine raspi power supply so that should be fine. Both corruptions happened during while updating HA. It wasn’t able to start any more.
The sd card wasn’t broken, but I had to reflash it.

Btw Did I use the term as card corruption wrong? Does it have to be defective to be called like that?

Edit: After setting pihole as my only dns Server it seems like I‘m having a performance boost. Feels like pages open up faster. Does that make sense or only a placebo?

18

It could be a combination of the two.

Pi-hole caches the DNS requests and does improve the speed when a cached DNS reply is returned.

There is also the possibility that the queries was split randomly between Pi-hole and whatever else was the DNS and the secondary one, could be indeed slower.

You can use NameBench to actually see any differences between answer times on several/custom DNS servers.

1 Like
19

Thanks for your suggestions. I wasn't able to run the tool on my mac to a ran it on an older windows pc.
As a conclusion I want to share my results:

First I ran a complete test with all the DNS servers available in the tool. This took a while and the result was that the 8.8.8.8 was best (49ms). Pihole had a bad result (840ms).

So I ran the test again, but this time only for pihole and 8.8.8.8. Probably have to mention that my pihole uses 8.8.8.8.
In this case pihole had much better results: pihole 35ms, google 50ms.

Same settings, another run: pihole 36ms, google 650ms (Note: shares-cache with current primary DNS).
So that might me the reason why it was slower and feels much faster now, right?

However there was another test with this confusing result:
google 47ms, Pihole 845ms (Note: A backup DNS server for this system, Slower replica of 8.8.8.8)

Also testet: pihole and 1.1.1.1
Result: both around 22ms
Ran severals tests, with alternating wins of both servers.

So the tests with pihole and 8.8.8.8 vary a bit, but most of the times the result sees pihole as the best option. In fact the variation of the tests makes sense to me, because this is what I experienced.

1 Like
20

No matter how you look at it, you are (in the end) at the mercy of what ever you use for upstream (google, cloudfare, opendns) and the speed your connection delivers the query and received the reply to/from those servers.

For best experience I recommend this: Redirecting...

Not only you bypass anything that's public and (who knows) overloaded but also cache stuff faster.

4 Likes
21

Interesting, but I ran pihole as an addon in Home Assistant (formally known as hassio), so I think changes like that are not possible in that case.

22

This topic was automatically closed 21 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.