Review on An Ad Blocking System using Remote Access via Tailscale or NextDNS

Online advertisements are obtrusive, a security risk, and they hinder performance and efficiency. Many users solve this with network-wide ad blockers on small computers like the Raspberry Pi. Pi-hole blocks advertising domains at the DNS level for every device on the home network, but it only protects devices on that network. Tailscale VPN, a secure WireGuard-based tunnel, extends this protection to remote devices by connecting them back to the Raspberry Pi from anywhere. This also saves data, since blocked files are never downloaded. This paper reviews recent literature (2022–2026) on combining Pi-hole and Tailscale on ARM-based single-board computers. Findings show such systems block the large majority of ad requests, improve loading speed, cost under one hundred dollars, and use very little power. Challenges remain, mainly DNS-over-HTTPS bypassing, and are discussed along with future work.