Most home networks use whatever DNS server the router or internet provider assigns. That works well enough, but running your own DNS server gives you more control—and lets you see what devices on your network are actually doing.
AdGuard Home is a simple way to set that up.
What Does It Do?
DNS translates names such as google.com into IP addresses that computers can use. AdGuard Home sits between your devices and an upstream DNS provider:Device → AdGuard Home → Upstream DNS → Internet
When a device requests a domain, AdGuard Home checks it against your filtering rules. The request is either allowed through or blocked.
Since DNS is used by nearly every device, the filtering can apply across your entire network—computers, phones, tablets, smart TVs, IoT devices and anything else configured to use AdGuard Home.
What Can You Run It On?
AdGuard Home does not require much hardware. You can run it on equipment you may already have, including:- A Raspberry Pi or similar single-board computer
- An old PC or laptop
- A Linux or Windows server
- A virtual machine
- A Docker container
- A NAS that supports applications or containers
- Some routers and network appliances
The main consideration is reliability. If the rest of your network depends on AdGuard Home for DNS, the system running it needs to be available whenever your network is in use.
More Than an Ad Blocker
The query log is probably the most useful feature for a home lab.AdGuard Home shows which domains devices are requesting, whether each request was allowed or blocked, how long the lookup took and which upstream DNS server responded.
It can be surprising to see how much activity happens in the background. Phones, televisions, computers and applications regularly contact telemetry, analytics and cloud-service domains even when nobody is actively using them.
You can learn a lot just by watching the DNS requests. You do not always need to start with packet captures to see what devices are contacting.
Local DNS
AdGuard Home can also handle local DNS rewrites for systems inside your network.Rather than remembering an address such as:
192.168.100.40
you can assign the system a hostname that is easier to recognize. That becomes especially useful in a home lab with several servers, routers, switches and other equipment.
One Thing to Understand
Installing AdGuard Home does not automatically make the network use it. Your clients—or the router or DNS server they currently use—must be configured to send DNS requests to AdGuard Home.One possible setup looks like this:
Clients → Router → AdGuard Home → Upstream DNS
With that arrangement, AdGuard Home may see the router as the source of the requests instead of seeing each device individually. Having clients use AdGuard Home directly can provide better per-device visibility.
Why Use It in a Home Lab?
AdGuard Home is lightweight, free and flexible. It can run on a small single-board computer, a virtual machine or an existing server.It provides network-wide DNS filtering, local DNS and a useful view of what devices on your network are requesting.
It is also a practical way to learn DNS. You can watch it work, change the settings, break something, troubleshoot it and see exactly what the changes do.