In any case, the easiest way to manually define the current location you are at (and to trigger the custom DNS server for your home location) is to go via the Apple logo on the top left of the screen and select to switch your location. I have yet to figure out what the behaviour is of MacOS when setting the location to ‘Automatic’. While the “Automatic” location will retrieve the DNS servers as they are suggested by the network I am connected to at that moment. When the Home location is selected in the Network Preferences, I point the DNS server to my Raspberry Pi. In my case, it was sufficient to create a Home location. You can remove existing locations, and remove locations afterwards as well. In the Network Preference section on your Macbook running MacOS, you can define a Location.

This location will allow you to define settings for different locations you will be at. Yet, you may be looking for a more elegant solution that does not require to open the settings each time you switch to another network. If you are using your device (for example: laptop or tablet) almost exclusively at home, this may be a sufficiently good solution for you. The solution could be to always redefine the DNS servers when switching between home and non-home networks. The result is: ‘no internet’, no webpage will load when on a non-home Wi-FI network. This is a problem because for example the McDonald’s Free Wi-Fi network will not recognise the internal IP address of my Raspberry Pi. The problem however I faced on MacOS was the following: when I set a custom DNS server (which pointed to my AdGuard service running on a Raspberry Pi) for my home Wi-FI network, the same DNS server would be used when connecting to other Wi-Fi networks. In the DNS tab, set the DNS server(s) which will be the internal IP address of your PI-Hole or AdGuard instance.Open Network Preferences and select Advanced.On my MacBook Pro, configuring the DNS server is as follows: This requires me to manually set my DNS server for each device. Each DNS request is sent to AdGuard and requests from advertisement networks are blocked.

This is a great adblocking tool – it works basically the same as Pi-Hole (which I tried before using AdGuard and its one of the best Raspberry Pi use cases). Currently I am running AgGuard to block ads when I am connected to my local network via Wi-Fi.

List dns servers mac