Pihole vs. Absolution

[Swistheater]

I am curious about what is everyones take on both of these ad solutions? I am trying to choose.

 

[skeal]

I am curious about what is everyones take on both of these ad solutions? I am trying to choose.

Do you own an supported Asus router? If you do, just install AB-Solution and that's it. No need for PiHole.

 

[Swistheater]

yea I asked because I am curious about the ad blocking methods. which one would hinder loading performance more. I am curious b/c I heard pi-hole can really hinder load performance on HTTPS platform, does absolution suffer this same type of issue or would you say it would be better at it.

 

[skeal]

yea I asked because I am curious about the ad blocking methods. which one would hinder loading performance more. I am curious b/c I heard pi-hole can really hinder load performance on HTTPS platform, does absolution suffer this same type of issue or would you say it would be better at it.

I have no idea what you mean by load performance. AB-Solution uses a server to answer adds. PiHole is a device that uses similar technology. Why buy another device when you have one that will meet your needs. AB-Solution is highly configurable and easy to maintain.

 

[jrmwvu04]

Given that it’s as easy or easier to use and configure and works on your existing hardware with no additional purchase (not to mention wiring or cabling or whatever), I can’t imagine any reason why AB isn’t the better choice.

 

[Xentrk]

pi-hole has a cool graphic interface with charts. AB-Solution will soon have something similar.

The primary issue with pi-hole is lack of support for ads delivered over https. I asked the pi-hole devs if they had considered using pixelserv-tls to fix this issue. They were not open to it. They felt implementing pixelserv-tls was akin to a man-in-the-middle attack. They appear to not understand fully how pixelserv-tls works from the reply I received.

As a result, I recommend you use AB-Solution. Plus, @thelonelycoder provides excellent support and continuously improves the product.

 

[noworries]

Pi-hole on a linux server on my network didn't provide ad-blocking services to my devices when I was remote and connecting with OpenVPN clients to my router's OpenVPN server. ABS does.

ABS, dnscrypt, pixelserv, and skynet now all run on my router. I'm happy. Thanks guys.

This collection of tools does a lot more than just block ads.

 

[Swistheater]

yes thank you for helping me understand better. I figured the pixelserv-tls didn't suffer from the same limitations. I am running absolution now. and dnscrypt and pixelserv and skynet. I wish absolution had a little more support for some of the features built in onboard to the router though like DNS filtering but it still works out well.

 

[Vexira]

does ab soloution block https ads or preforme elment hiding and block popups?

 

[Xentrk]

does ab soloution block https ads or preforme elment hiding and block popups?

Enable the pixelserv-tls feature to handle the https ads. pixelserv-tls generates the certificates required by https ads.

 

[Vexira]

Now I'm tempted to replace pi hole with ab sloution, I wish that I could run it off a raspberry pi or sbc rather than my router it would be nice so I could use it any where.
But I'll wait for the gui version.
So I'd assume that that would get rid of the youtube ads provided that their in a list.

 

[thelonelycoder]

does ab soloution block https ads or preforme elment hiding and block popups?

Yes and no.
AB-Solution blocks domains the same way as Pi-Hole, with the added bonus that my ad-blocker employs pixelserv-tls to block https requests and replaces some content with a pixel sized image. It does this on the router level, meaning it cannot remove gaps on a browser level like browser addons can.
Still, the limited capability of AB-Solution together with pixelserv-tls results in an overall impressive web-experience and in my opinion is superior to Pi-Hole.

The impressive Pi-Hole Webui is nice and AB-Solution will in a future update have one too, but maybe not as shiny...
The underlying mechanism that does the ad-blocking and the feature set the AB-Solution Shell UI offers is much more feature rich than any other competing ad-blocker I know of on a router/separate device level.

 

[Vexira]

Yes and no.
AB-Solution blocks domains the same way as Pi-Hole, with the added bonus that my ad-blocker employs pixelserv-tls to block https requests and replaces some content with a pixel sized image. It does this on the router level, meaning it cannot remove gaps on a browser level like browser addons can.
Still, the limited capability of AB-Solution together with pixelserv-tls results in an overall impressive web-experience and in my opinion is superior to Pi-Hole.

The impressive Pi-Hole Webui is nice and AB-Solution will in a future update have one too, but maybe not as shiny...
The underlying mechanism that does the ad-blocking and the feature set the AB-Solution Shell UI offers is much more feature rich than any other competing ad-blocker I know of on a router/separate device level.

Ah cool, I hope one day there will be a version that works on an sbc like a pi, problem is my router seem to unstable for such things, only reason I run a pi hole other than the massive amounts of domains I have blocked.

 

[thelonelycoder]

Ah cool, I hope one day there will be a version that works on an sbc like a pi, problem is my router seem to unstable for such things, only reason I run a pi hole other than the massive amounts of domains I have blocked.

The RT-AC88U has 512 MB RAM, together with a same-sized swap file is more than sufficient for a blocking file with a million or so domains blocked in AB-Solution.

 

[Vexira]

The RT-AC88U has 512 MB RAM, together with a same-sized swap file is more than sufficient for a blocking file with a million or so domains blocked in AB-Solution.

I mean unstable in other ways. And I'm running close to 2 million domains.
My router needs to be rebooted everday in order for it to work correctly which is annoying, it the only way it preforms properly without issues, I'm just thinking that in its current state, adding more scripts is not a good idea.

 

[Swistheater]

My experience with absolution so far has been awesome...

 

[heysoundude]

My experience with absolution so far has been awesome...

Show him how awesome with some of your money: http://ab-solution.info/donate.html

 

[kvic]

Don't forget that pixelserv-tls speeds up your webpage load time. See benchmark done on an old version. A refresh to the benchmark on v2.0. With SSL caching in v2.1, webpages just load even faster.

Pi-Hole uses lighttpd to serve empty HTTP ads. I bet that's 10-100 times slower. Lighttpd also cannot work like pixelserv-tls. Hence, Pi-Hole can't do HTTPS ads. As a result, you're going through a slower browsing experience with Pi-Hole.

 

[Vexira]

Don't forget that pixelserv-tls speeds up your webpage load time. See benchmark done on an old version. A refresh to the benchmark on v2.0. With SSL caching in v2.1, webpages just load even faster.

Pi-Hole uses lighttpd to serve empty HTTP ads. I bet that's 10-100 times slower. Lighttpd also cannot work like pixelserv-tls. Hence, Pi-Hole can't do HTTPS ads. As a result, you're going through a slower browsing experience with Pi-Hole.

Actually the pi hole dev's stated they don't block https ads because or the certificates and they didn't want to preform a man in the middle attack, plus their blocking is dns based not proxy based.

 

[DonnyJohnny]

I mean unstable in other ways. And I'm running close to 2 million domains.
My router needs to be rebooted everday in order for it to work correctly which is annoying, it the only way it preforms properly without issues, I'm just thinking that in its current state, adding more scripts is not a good idea.

Omg... 2mil domains... that’s f a lot of ads! U sure that is no duplicate?
What list you using? From where. Maybe I can increase mine if needed.
I only have around 400k and I seldom see ads. If I see any, simply blacklist them accordingly. Currently I have 41 manual blacklist.