AdGuardHome on Asuswrt-Merlin

Home should always be a safe place for navigating the internet, especially for children. As they often use it for listening to music or conducting school research, it's crucial to ensure that they have access to the internet while safeguarding them from inappropriate content.

Both of my children have computers in their rooms running Debian with Gnome.Initially, I opted to block all outgoing ports, including HTTP and HTTPS, but allowed Spotify ports to enable them to listen to music. Additionally, I implemented parental controls on the router through DNS query filtering by default.

However, one of my children occasionally needs to access specific educational websites. Consequently, I had to open HTTP and HTTPS ports while maintaining the default router parental controls. I filtered everything except the sites she needed access to, ensuring she couldn't visit platforms like YouTube or other social media sites.

To enhance our internet security measures, I installed AdGuardHome, an excellent free and open-source DNS server that blocks advertisements, trackers, malware, and phishing attempts. It offers customizable features, allowing me to specify clients with local IP addresses and create custom filters for them. In addition to filtering adult or inappropriate content, I can incorporate additional filtering rules via automatically updated blocklists from GitHub.

Thanks to these measures, my children can now safely browse the internet, access educational websites, and listen to music when they wish—all while ensuring their online safety. Even if they attempt to change DNS servers on their computers, there are additional precautions in place to address such actions.

The icing on the cake, I installed few months ago Asuswrt-Merlin on my Asus RT-AX88U router and there is an existing installer for AdGuardHome: https://github.com/jumpsmm7/Asuswrt-Merlin-AdGuardHome-Installer. Now, I successfully run it on my router without any additional running computer or raspberry pi.