New to the Community...Setting up remote dns using pi hole

General
1

Hi guys,
I am new to the community. I was given the pi hole links from another forum and even though I have been administering my own business web hosting and email servers for quite some time, I did not know of pi hole before.

Background

I have kids with windows10 laptops who regularly manage to get around our Microsoft family parental controls restrictions and settings.

Solution
setup my own dns that I can then use as a means of:

  1. restricting content they can access from their laptops
  2. restricting web browsing times according to timetables I control

the above enforced by manually configuring the network dns settings on each laptop such that each laptop accesses online resources via dns server ip addresses that I set (completed by logging into each windows 10 admin account)

will pi hole also work on a cloud VPS server I configure and control directly for remote dns over WAN (example, if kids are also at school on school wifi outside of our home network)

2

Dont do that or you'll be running an open resolver contributing to DDoS attacks against other victims:

https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ddos/dns-amplification-ddos-attack/

Trying to lockdown the laptops by just blocking DNS queries for particular domains (thats all Pi-hole can do) is a waste of time.
Pi-hole isn't that kind of a solution.
The kids will figure out very quickly how to circumvent your restrictions.
For example browsers nowadays have DoH that circumvents DNS entirely:

If still want a little control, you can install Pi-hole in a VPS if access through a VPN tunnel.
The laptops would have to be connected to VPN all the time.
Checkout PI-hole's official guide:

https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/vpn/overview/

3

ok,
so if i am using a vpn tunnel through a pi hole device VPS, this would mean that the internet usage data is now being charged directly to my VPS bandwidth. That isnt an ideal solution i dont think.

the reason i was considering dns solutions is because it avoid data bandwidth charges.

Trying to lockdown the laptops by just blocking DNS queries for particular domains (thats all Pi-hole can do) is a waste of time.
Pi-hole isn't that kind of a solution.
The kids will figure out very quickly how to circumvent your restrictions.
For example browsers nowadays have DoH that circumvents DNS entirely:

when you say that, are kids using child accounts on a windows 10 machine who only have access to Microsoft Edge browser going to be able to circumvent anything without appropriate administrator level of access?

4

Check the "Overview" page again, you can do it two ways:

https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/vpn/overview/

I'm not M$ certified to give you a proper answer.
But have you for example considered boot sequence in the laptop BIOS ?

EDIT:

5

I do have a trick for you that also circumvents DNS resolution.
All Windows systems have a hosts file at below location:

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

That hosts file will be checked first before Windows does a DNS query.
Edit that file as admin and put in extra lines for all the domains you want to be blocked eg:

0.0.0.0 adult.art.site