AdGuard is nothing but a DNS server(it can also act as DHCP server), where
you can configure which sites you can visit, which sites can be block(kinda ad blocking) etc.
This tool will be helpful to avoid tracking, blocking ads, control your home networking etc.
1. For setting up AdGuard in your home network, you need a server that needs to be running 24/7, it could be an old laptop or small pc or even a raspberry pi does the job.
2. Once the above step has been done, just install the AdGuard tools in your server, you can check the installation here once the installation has been done, you will get admin dashboard where you can configure blocking sites, allowing sites and much more.
3. Now in order to make this work across your LAN(home) network, first you need to go to your router
and disable the router's DNS and also disable the router DHCP server.
What is DHCP Server:
DHCP server is a server that listens on port 67, in any LAN(home) network, if u try to connect with
WI-FI of that network, first your device will broadcast to all the possible devices in that network
to find which device has the DHCP server(by default this will be router), in our case now the adguard server
will send the response that am the DHCP server and i will assign u a static ip like(192.168.0.12) something like that.
You can also set the range of Ip's in adguard settings which it can assign in that range for the clients.
TL-DR: DHCP server is responsible for giving static IP's to devices, that wants
to connect in our local network.
4. After Disabling both DNS and DHCP from your Home router, now enable these both
in AdGuard under admin settings.
NOTE: Also Set default Static IP to your AdGuard installed computer/server,
this is important otherwise on every restart your AdGuard server itself will
broadcast to DHCP server(which itself) to get new static IP.
5. Once step 4 has been done, now restart your router and disconnect and connect to your wifi from all your client devices.
NOTE: You may have a question, for ad blocking and site filtering, the DNS server alone is enough.
So why did we configure DHCP server on AdGuard?
If you have that question in your mind, the answer is:
Yes, technically we don't need a DHCP server on our AdGuard computer.
But what happens if we don’t enable DHCP on AdGuard computer and keep using the router’s default DHCP server?
In that case, whenever any new client connects to your LAN(home) WI-FI, your router’s DHCP server will handle it and assign an IP address.
However, we’ve disabled DNS on the router, the DHCP response from router to the client
will not include any DNS server information (in this case, your client device DNS can have either 0.0.0.0 or be empty).
As a result, whenever you connect any device you need to manually configure the DNS IP (the AdGuard server’s LAN IP).
This could be tedious in the long run, coz its manual work.
Thats y we made our AdGuard computer, the DHCP server as well — so every device automatically gets the correct
IP address and DNS settings without any manual setup.