That might explain the problem. Assuming adguard returns an nxdomain for blocked sites then the devices will try with their secondary DNS server and get to the blocked site

Sorry I misread your post. You shouldn’t need the 172 address in your DNS config, stick to the 127 address only.

In regard to the issue itself. Do your devices show their DNS server as the adguard server?

Your adguard config looks strange. The examples shown list different DNS providers but you have pointed it back at itself for its DNS. I don’t understand why you would do that.

I have a similar setup using Truenas to store data. I’ve setup a VM in Truenas that can access the data via NFS (easier to setup on Linux than SMB).

It’s nice to keep all your services contained in one machine, as long as it has enough resources, and will probably consume less power than running another PC.

I use qbittorrent, most people seem to agree it performs better than Transmission. It’s accessible from a web interface.

RAID5 is risky on drives that large, there’s a decent chance of a read error during a rebuild.

RAID6 will provide more protection but you lose two drives worth of capacity to the parity data. I’m not sure if a three drive RAID6 is actually possible but a three way mirror would be more sensible as you’ll avoid the extra computation of parity calculation.

Imo RAID6 starts to make sense in an array of 5 or more drives.

I just tried adding a native VPN and there’s no option to use Wireguard

Pinhole has allowed custom local records for a very long time now

Higher end cable testers can show you where the break is, but it will be far more expensive that a new cable.

And if you’re looking for a way to simplify the setup process: borgmatic

It depends how valuable your data is, what backup strategy you have, and how long you’re prepared to wait to get access to your data when a drive fails.

Personally if/when I migrate my main dataset to SSD, I’ll stick with RAIDZ2/RAID6.

I’ve seen a few people recommending paperless-ngx