So I am new to this
I have an Orange Pi 3 LTS that I want to use for network-wide adblocking. Moreover, I live in a country where it’s normal for the ruling body to shutdown any service any time, so I am looking to setup a VPN on that PiHole to.
Now the remote access kind of VPN but the one that circumvents the region-locks.
Can anyone point me in the right direction to set this up?
The average pay over here is 100$ / month so it’ll be a great help if this project can be done with a free VPN service.
If you want geo unblocking, you need two things if you want to circumvent VPN entirely.
Pihole and a DNS proxy like smartdnsproxy. Then you can create a custom file (eg: proxy.cfg) under /etc/dnsmasq.d/ and forward custom domains to dns of that proxy server. So your normal dns traffic will still go through upstream server of pihole but geo restricted domains will go to proxy dns, if that makes sense. That’s how I unblock some websites that are geo blocked. Pls ignore if not relevant to your question.
What you need is VPN service, there are free VPNs out there but they are not as fast as paid ones. You can set VPN with some routers, you don’t need a pihole. Even premium VPN can be slow especially if you want to use it for your whole local network. No one is going to let you use their network, not for free.
As close as free and secure you’re going to get would be a cloud VM in digital ocean or something. You can get away with around $5 per month for a barebones one. Free VPNs are insecure and terribly slow.
Rent a server in a different country …. Install Pi-hole and Tailscale … be happy with 5 bucks a month
From what I know PiVPN is just to create my own VPN that I can tunnel into from any other network.
It will not let me access region-locked websites or content as it itself is being region-locked.
Absolutely do not use a free vpn. They’re making money somehow, and likely by selling your data.
Can I circumvent the block by using encrypted DNS?
You’ll need to purchase a VPN service that lets you connect to their servers then. Unless there’s free ones available? I’ve always used PIA and never really looked for free services like that.
Then this is something outside the scope of PiHole
Unless there’s free ones available
“If you don’t pay for it, you’re the product being sold”
Even if one exists, don’t touch a free VPN with a 10-ft pole!
My question is can I combine PiHole and a 3rd party VPN service (preferably unpaid) for a network-wide Adblocking + VPN solution.
As everyone else here has already said, do not use a free VPN.
VPNs use their own DNS, so using a VPN on your PC isn’t going to use the Pihole at all while it’s running.
Running an outbound VPN on your Pihole also isn’t going to funnel all your net traffic through the VPN either, all that would do is funnel your Pihole’s DNS queries to the VPN provider first, adding an extra hop and slowing it down considerably.