Adventures in Homelabbing: DNS, AdGuard, and the Joy of Controlling Your Network

There’s a moment in every homelab journey where you realize something important:

Your internet is doing far more talking than you think.

Every device in your house is constantly making DNS requests.

Phones.
Laptops.
Smart TVs.
IoT devices.
Random apps quietly phoning home.

Most people never see this traffic.

Because DNS usually lives in the background — invisible infrastructure quietly translating domain names into IP addresses.

But once you start running your own network services, DNS becomes very visible.

And very interesting.

This is how I ended up running AdGuard Home in my homelab.

The Problem: Your Devices Are Chatty

Out of curiosity, I started inspecting DNS traffic on my network.

What I expected: normal lookups for websites.

What I actually saw:

• trackers

• telemetry endpoints

• analytics domains

• ad networks

• random domains from apps I wasn’t even using

And the volume was ridiculous.

Some devices were making hundreds of requests per hour to domains that clearly had nothing to do with the core functionality of the device.

At that point the engineer brain kicks in.

If DNS is the phone book of the internet, then controlling DNS means controlling who your devices can talk to.

Enter AdGuard Home

So I deployed AdGuard Home inside the homelab.

For those unfamiliar, AdGuard Home is basically a network-level DNS filter.

Instead of every device resolving DNS directly through your ISP or public resolvers, they send their queries through AdGuard first.

AdGuard then:

1. checks the domain

2. blocks trackers and ad domains

3. forwards legitimate queries upstream

The result is simple but powerful.

The entire network becomes cleaner.

Ads disappear.

Tracking endpoints stop resolving.

And suddenly you can actually see what devices are trying to do.

The Surprising Part

The real fun wasn’t the ad blocking.

It was the visibility.

You start noticing patterns:

• Smart TVs constantly calling analytics endpoints

• Mobile apps checking telemetry servers every few seconds

• IoT devices pinging cloud services you didn’t even know they depended on

Your network begins to look less like a simple connection to the internet and more like a busy ecosystem of automated conversations.

Some legitimate.

Some questionable.

Some completely unnecessary.

And once you see that traffic, you start asking better questions.

Why does a light bulb need to contact five different domains?

Why is a weather app making requests to multiple ad networks?

Why is my phone resolving domains every few seconds even when idle?

DNS logs become a surprisingly good way to understand how modern software behaves.

Why Homelabbing Changes How You See the Internet

Running your own infrastructure changes your relationship with technology.

Instead of consuming services passively, you begin to observe the plumbing underneath.

You notice things like:

• DNS resolution patterns

• network chatter

• API calls

• background telemetry

And once you notice them, it becomes difficult to unsee them.

The internet starts to feel less like magic and more like a giant distributed system full of moving parts.

Which, of course, it is.

A Small But Powerful Shift

Running your own DNS resolver isn’t revolutionary.

But it represents a small shift in mindset.

Instead of accepting the default configuration of the internet stack, you start asking:

• Can I run this myself?

• Can I see what’s happening?

• Can I control this layer?

Sometimes the answer is yes.

And that’s where homelabbing becomes addictive.

Because every layer you take control of teaches you something new about how the internet actually works.

DNS just happens to be one of the most revealing places to start.

What’s Next in the Homelab

AdGuard is just the beginning.

Once DNS becomes part of your infrastructure, a lot of interesting possibilities open up:

• local DNS overrides for internal services

• split-horizon DNS for homelab domains

• DNS over HTTPS / DNS over TLS

• network observability

• service discovery

Before long, the homelab stops being just a hobby.

It becomes a small-scale version of the systems that power the internet itself.

And that’s where the real fun begins.