November 1, 2021

AdGuard Home on Ubiquiti Cloud Key

I have been running a filtering DNS instance on my Synology for a while as described by Gerzon on his blog, which originally was detailed on old Synology forums - but those URLs no longer work. This set up was running fine. I have used this DNS instance to host records for internal network, and I could always add some one-off blocks to it as well on as-needed basis. But I wasn't keeping it up-to-date with filter list updates, and so I was looking for a way to automate the update process.

While looking for alternative solutions (such as PiHole) I have and stumbled upon AdGuard Home package, which looked exactly what I needed, and more, with features as per-client configuration. So I have decided to give it a whirl, and install it on another host - to keep existing set up running just in case I needed a backup. UniFi Cloud Key Plus was a target for my AdGuard set up, and it was a breeze. A Reddit user has described installation steps here. With differences being, I have not yet installed a Micro SD card into Cloud Key, so I have installed it into /opt/adguard, and stored AdGuard's data in /var/opt/adguard.

mkdir /opt/adguard && cd /opt/adguard
# unzip adguard here
mkdir /var/opt/adguard
ln -s /var/opt/adguard data
# proceed with install steps

That's it! Now I can have it all: nice UI with DNS query logging capabilities, benefits of auto-updating filters, and per-client control over devices on my network on top of that. 🎉

Posted by Vadim at 5:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack