VPN with ad blocker

[weaverinva]

Hello all, how do of any of you best accomplished doing ad blocking along with Nord VPN or the other vpn services or Tailscale. Do you run ad guard home and reference that server? across Nord or Tailscale?
What is an optimal way to use a vpn for protection and all get great ad blocking like AdGuard app on Android phone (which uses the sole vpn active slot). I have an Asus router but considering opnsense and could run unbound or adguard home on something as well. I don't know what dnsmasq is yet. Thank you in advance.

 

[ColinTaylor]

You shouldn't really group Nord VPN and other VPN providers together with Tailscale. They are fundamentally different things that may require different approaches.

That said, both usually offer the ability to specify which DNS servers the client uses. So that could be any DNS server that also provides ad-blocking. Which one you choose is entirely your own preference. Alternatively run an ad blocking app on the client itself which is likely to be more effective.

 

[weaverinva]

You shouldn't really group Nord VPN and other VPN providers together with Tailscale. They are fundamentally different things that may require different approaches.

That said, both usually offer the ability to specify which DNS servers the client uses. So that could be any DNS server that also provides ad-blocking. Which one you choose is entirely your own preference. Alternatively run an ad blocking app on the client itself which is likely to be more effective.

Thank you Colin!
I should not have included tailscale.

What ad blocking do you use? I like adguard though it uses the VPN on my android. If I used nordvpn with mesh, I think that some connect to their own adguard home. Others use nextdns.

Do you have any tips tricks or recommendations?

Peace.

 

[ColinTaylor]

I don't have any particular recommendations. But then I don't normally have a VPN client enabled on my devices.

On the router I use my own ad blocking solution. Functionally it's very similar to the "Diversion" addon script using the "Large" block list. I have experimented with external DNS ad blocking from the likes of NextDNS and they all seem to work well enough with little to differentiate one from another. For Windows PCs I use uBlock Origin.