I’m fairly new to all this. I’ve read terms like Merlin, DHCP Pi-hole, etc… but am really lost. There seem to be a lot of options and I’m not sure what to do.
In my household we currently have a paid VPN provider with a northerly name installed on selected devices where masking or relocating our IPs makes sense for certain activities. We also run browser extension such as Adblock and uBlock Origin on our Microsoft devices.
I’m struggling with managing unwanted ads and other stuff on other devices and plan to install Pi-hole on a Synology NAS I just ordered to enable some ad blocking by default on all devices connected to my Wifi network.
However, I’ve read that using a VPN from a device directly, will circumvents whatever is installed on the NAS and that the solution to this is to install the VPN service at the router level and configure it and Pi-hole to play nicely with each other. Is this correct?
Finally, for work I’d like to have an option to connect to my employers VPN directly through my ‘raw’ unfiltered ISP connection to avoid any potential issues.
For this to work, what options do I have?
- A second router connected to the one provided by my ISP where I set up a WiFi network for private devices with Pi-hole and the VPN and leave the ISP router as is?
- Safe, because if I mess it up, I can always switch networks?
- Allows me to switch to this network with my devices when I want to use the VPN app from my device (for quick IP relocation when needed)
- A fancier router with selective device specific VPN capabilities?
- Other?