I have a similar story… But first off, you can do that directly through the pihole’s UI. No need to set up custom DNS stuff just for her. Just create an empty blocklist, and assign her devices to only use that list. Multiple blocklists are also handy if you have kids, because you can set things like porn blocklists, and only assign them to the kids’ devices. So you can still jork it when you want, without the kids being able to accidentally stumble across anything.

I have a basic blocklist for guests as well, which is the default list for any new device that connects to my guest network. It selectively blocks some of the more invasive BS but doesn’t block some of the more “this will make things on your device stop working” trackers, like how some Google devices refuse to work unless you allow their trackers.

I’m pretty sure you can even set lists to default based on an IP range? Like if you have multiple subnets for different VLANs, you can set a default list (or lists) for each VLAN. So like you can have an IoT VLAN with a default “stop phoning home, I just want to be able to cast to you” type of blocklist. Then your guest VLAN can have its own default list. And your personal devices can have their own list as well. I haven’t personally dug into that yet, but it’s on my list of future projects.

My wife was annoyed with my dual piholes until I got some basic whitelists dialed in for her. She’s a stock Android user, and my Google blocklist broke basically all of her phone’s native apps… Because Google’s invasive tracking is fully wormed through all of them.

It basically took an evening of us hunt-and-peck’ing our way through her phone’s blocked requests, whitelisting one thing at a time to see what was necessary and what was just tracking BS. I set her up with an automatic VPN that connected whenever she was away from the house, so she was always connected to the home network, and always protected by the pihole. Once we got that figured out, (and she learned to stop clicking the damned sponsored Google search results, which fail to connect with the pihole), she basically stopped noticing it. She got used to having it. She started taking it for granted…

We recently moved, and I haven’t had time to set my media/server stuff back up yet. I’m just running the basic ISP modem/router for the time being. And now that she got used to the pihole, she has been hit with whiplash because she’s suddenly seeing ads again. She visited her usual World of Warcraft site, and was like “what the fuck is this? The damned site is basically unusable…” She insists on using Chrome, (because it’s what her phone uses, and she wants to sync between the two), so I was only able to install the lite version of uBlock Origins as a stopgap, because Google intentionally broke the full version.

What really got her was when she noticed our Roku TV’s idle screen suddenly had ads. She was like “what the hell do you mean the goddamned TV has built-in ads? We aren’t even watching anything right now! It’s just the fucking sleep screen!”

Yes dear, why do you think I insisted on setting the pihole up years ago? Ads are invasive, and you don’t even realize how bad it is until you’re out. Once you get used to living without them, going back is rough.

She probably also feasts on AI slop. Just gobbling that shit up.

She ever give a reason, or nah?

Time to get a divorce