this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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I've been using adguards free DNS to eliminate adds and recently switched to Mullvads add free DNS. Mullvad lets through a few ads adguad catches but stops many other things. Since Netguard has 2 slots for DNS, I put them both. Is that a problem, or do I have the best of both worlds?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My understanding is the first one is the primary one, and will be used most of the time. The second one is the fallback and will be used if the primary isn’t reachable

Usually you’d have two different addresses from the same service to configure DNS

Listing addresses from two different services would get you a slightly inconsistent experience, where every once in awhile a different block list will be used

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My understanding is the first one is the primary one, and will be used most of the time.

This depends on your OS. Many do it this way, but some (I think Windows is included here) periodically check and use the "fastest" one. I run 2 local DNS, and my windows devices tend to represent about 99% of the the queries showing up on the second DNS (which sees much lower traffic overall).

I have no idea what happens when you have 2 different blocklists though - it feels like you could open yourself up to a scenario where you only get content blocked if it's blocked on BOTH lists, which would be the worst of both worlds in a sense.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Usually your OS will just send dns requests to both servers at once and just accept whichever responds first. UDP isnt very smart.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Not sure about that, maybe that's the an approach for one OS, but most of the devices I have almost exclusively hit the first DNS.

Looking right now my primary DNS has ~29k queries across 17 clients with a fairly even spread across the top 5-6, while secondary shows 2.5k queries across 7 clients, with one client alone (a Mac) representing 2k of those queries.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Let me clarify, Mullvad is in the first slot, second slot is empty. A few ads get through. I put adguard in the second slot, no ads get through. Is there any way I can check if Mullvad is still active or could I just put adguards block list in my Netguard hosts file and just use Mullvad.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Problem solved. Mullvad wasn't being used so I switched to Quad9 and it blocks ads.