EDIT: So because of my $0 budget and the fact that my uptime is around 50% (PC, no additional servers) I ended up using NextDNS. For the time being it works (according to dnsleaktest), an added benefit was improved ad-blocking (100% in this tool). I now have plans for a proper router in the future with a Pi-hole. Thanks so much for all the info & suggestions, definitely learnt a lot.
So it turns out I got myself into an ISP that was shittier than expected (I already knew it was kinda shitty), they DNS hijack for whatever reason and I can’t manually set my own DNS on my router or even my devices.
Cyber security has never been my forte but I’m always trying to keep learning as I go. I’ve read that common solutions involve using a different port (54) or getting a different modem/router or just adding a router.
Are they all true? Whats the cheapest, easiest way of dealing with all of this?
On modern versions of Windows (and probably other OSes), you can configure it to use DNS over HTTPS with a service like Quad9 or Cloudflare, which will fix this.
To do this across all your devices, even those that don’t support DoH, install AdGuard Home on a home server or Raspberry Pi or your PC if it’s always on. ISPs can’t intercept DoH requests. Then configure your router to set the DNS server to your AdGuard Home server.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web HTTPS HTTP over SSL IP Internet Protocol PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL VPN Virtual Private Network
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You missed two that I’d like to know about. DoH and DoT. Thanks, robot!
DNS over HTTPS, DNS over TLS
Thank you, I had to figure it out myself haha.
Good bot.
Setup a local DNS server in your local network, and configure it to forward everything to an external DNS provider over TLS (port 853 usually). This is known as DNS over TLS (or DoT as other people mentioned).
I personally like https://cyberia.is
Set up your router to use DNS-over-HTTPS if it supports it.
If not you can install Adguard Home somewhere, set your devices to use that for DNS, and set it to use DNS-over-HTTPS for the upstream servers.
Just throwing out a couple of other solutions I didn’t see mentioned for DoH/DoT:
- CoreDNS
- Blocky
Both of those support encryption and allow for DNSBL. If you are wanting to hand out DNS entries over DHCP it may a problem with your ISPs router there. Either replace it, sit one you do control between it and your network, or run DHCP snooping from a switch to restrict it’s DHCP.
This Blocky?
Will keep them in mind, thanks a lot.
Yep, that’s the one. You just set your upstream default to something like tcp-tls:1.1.1.1:853 for DoT (which is what I use anyway).
Good documentation on other features like adblocking,caching,etc: https://0xerr0r.github.io/blocky/v0.21/configuration/
If you have the option to use a DNS on a different port, you can take a look at OpenNIC. There are a number of servers available that answer on multiple ports. Development has been stalled for a few years now but we’re still keeping the back-end stuff running. You can find info at https://www.opennic.org/ and https://servers.opennic.org/
So is your ISP blocking or redirecting outgoing requests on port 53? You said you can’t set dns servers on your own devices so I’m just trying to understand why that doesn’t work.
Why can you not set your own DNS on your devices?
If you mean you can’t set your DNS automatically that would be due to DHCP. You can setup your own DHCP server and set the DNS IP to whatever you want (8.8.8.8 etc).
PiHole should handle all this for you all while blocking ads and being a local DNS resolver.
