AdGuard Home causing connection issues

Hi everyone and thanks in advance for your comments and help!

Yesterday I decided to install the AdGuard Home on my Home Assistant. Followed few of the YouTube guides and managed to set it up pretty quickly. Thought it all went well, until I noticed that:

  • I get a very serious lag when opening a webpage for the first time, or after some time has passed. Sometimes I could be waiting 7-10 sec. Once opened, all the links inside the page would open very quickly.
  • The connection to the HASS also was compromised - sometimes it would freeze or if some time has passed, I would even get message ā€œConnection lost, reconnectingā€¦ā€ . Also I get kicked out of my routerā€™s management web interface and have to log in again.
    Tried playing with many options, but without success. Once I remove the AdGuard DNS address from the Router DHCP server settings, all gets back to normal.

My configuration is as follows:

  • HP Proliant ML350p running ESXI 7;
  • HASS as a virtual machine on the ESXI;
  • AdGuard as Add-On on the HASS;
  • Asus TUF AX4200

I am using the routerā€™s DHCP server and not the AdGuard one. In the DNS server I have the IP of the HASS machine and on the WAN I have Googleā€™s 8.8.8.8 address.

Side observation - not sure but it seems I am observing this lag of 10 sec and connection drop only on the laptop, but not on my phone. On both I am using Chrome for browsing. But when I force the DNS on my laptop wifi connection to quad9, the connection is significantly improved, but the connection issues to HASS are still present (ā€œConnection lost, reconnecting ā€¦ā€ mesage), and the router still kickes me out every now and then.

Thanks!

So what is the current chain?

Device (pc/phone) - get dns server ip of adguard?
Adguard uses what ip for dns? Router or google?
Router uses whatdm dns? Google?

Visualize this flow and then you might find the bottleneck.

If your adguard also gets the dns (via HA) via dhcp you might have a loop and then it starts with only the 1st dns server (loop) and then queries the second one after a whileā€¦

When I wrote this post, situation was as follows:

  • HASS - static IP (I guess i just took it from the DHCP server on the router);
  • AdGuard Home - same as HASS;
  • Router settings:
    • WAN - IP from the provider;
      - DNS - 8.8.8.8; 8.8.4.4;
    • LAN - DHCP server - standard settings;
      - DNS server - DNS1: the IP of the HASS / AdGuard
      - DNS2: empty

After writing this post i dug deeper into the HASS network settings and saw that the DNS address is the same as my router, so i figured that might be causing a loop and issues, so I changed it to Quad9. Since I did that, things have been a bit better, but now I am thinking that my entire HASS virtual machine is exposed without going through the AdGuard Home.
Also, in all guides Iā€™ve seen it only says ā€œgo staticā€, and nobody mentiones about changing the DNS settings of the HASS when doing that.

So what do you think adguard does for you? What are you trying to get out of it?

Here is my rant on the subject, you take from it what you will.

Recent Quote from user: ā€œI donā€™t really understand what it doesā€
Thatā€™s the problem with AdGuard and Pihole.
Thatā€™s why I do not suggest anyone use it unless you understand what it does.
It provides a man-in-the-middle attack on your personal data to supposedly ā€œhelpā€ you, but always does what people tell it and people have no idea what they are telling it to do. It has ZERO to do with security.
Result is this cry for help repeated over and over | I canā€™t get websites to reply & DNS brokenā€¦

And if you are trusting this homemade software with random lists of ā€˜badā€™ places to help secure your stuff over quad9, google, or other well known DNS servers, you need to re-evaluate,

thatā€™s my advice.

If you have a youngster in the house that is watching porn or something, Maybe then for that, but learn what it does and how to use it. Itā€™s doing nothing security wise.

Its doing ā€œsomethingā€ security wise though. It blocks known urls to be hosting bad content.

And yes you need to ā€œtrustā€ it.

But whatā€™s the alternative? I have zero or minimal ads and overall experience is very good. No ads in any android apps, no ads in webpages and overall browsing is more ā€œsnappyā€.

I do not use the addon but have 2 separate and equally configured adguard home dns server running.

And to be honest: sometimes when ā€œsomethingā€ is not working well, the first thing is to ā€œdisableā€ adguard scanning :slight_smile:

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Thatā€™s interestingā€¦ i installed adguard on my asus router and it works perfectly, and i didnā€™t change anything from default. What do i gain? Tons of commercials NOT showing, web pages loading noticeably fasterā€¦
Yes, itā€™s not a security feature, but anti-commercial one.

I would love to do that and this was my original idea, but canā€™t. The AX4200 does not support Merlin, so Iā€™m stuck with the OEM firmware. Unless I go the OpenWRT route, which Iā€™m still debating with myself about, as I love the app on my phone for easy access and control.
Most probably Iā€™ll just install the AdGuard on a VM on the ESXI. This way Iā€™ll avoid all potential loops. I went the HAss way, as it was super easy and fast to deploy.

Most probably Iā€™ll go this way to. Will deploy them as VMs on the ESXI. Will try later today and see how it goes.

As a YT Creator, it has other effects on people like me as well.
Remember Napster?
Sites on Kodi with stolen movies.
There is also thatā€¦

And the almost daily I canā€™t use HA BC it wonā€™t open any websites that are more than half the time this problem. My first question, you using one of these things?

No, itā€™s been long time since Iā€™ve used Kodi. I have AppleTV, Netflix and Spotify subscriptions which are usually more than enough. Itā€™s been quite a while since Iā€™ve downloaded torrents as well.
In general, pretty boring in terms of misusing the Internet latelyā€¦ :smile:

Deployed a separate VM on Debian working just for the AdGuard. Everything behaves much better now. I guess there is something in my configuration that causes problem. Iā€™ve read in other discussions that disabling the DHCP server of the router and using the AdGuard one fixes such problems, but it comes with other limitations.
So, Iā€™ll keep it as separate VM machines and will later will set-up a second server as a back-up. Maybe Iā€™ll try technitium, letā€™s seeā€¦