Comment on The Beauty Of Having A Pi-hole · Den Delimarsky
lupusblackfur@lemmy.world 13 hours agoInteresting…
I’ve a single Pihole instance running on a RPi 4 and have experienced not a single instance of any of the 3 probs you mention. Except, of course, the very few minutes it takes for a reboot which I can schedule and am aware when it’s happening…
🤷♂️
Literally just had my pihole hard crash this weekend due to a bad update to FTL. Apparently they had a major version upgrade and didn’t bother to read the notes so I had to do a full OS reinstall.
Back up your configs people. Had to dig through documentation to find the sqlite file and then parse through it like some sort of animal.
Literally just had my pihole hard crash this weekend due to a bad update to FTL. Apparently they had a major version upgrade and didn’t bother to read the notes so I had to do a full OS reinstall.
The v6 upgrade was such a disaster. I was bitten by it too, it started the upgrade then halfway through decided it didn’t like my OS (debian-testing) and crapped out … leaving me with a b0rked installation. Luckily I was able to return to v5 using my system backup. It was a right pain to figure out how to restore though, because they write files all over /opt, /etc, /usr/bin, /usr/local and /var.
For this reason I have since dockerized my pihole installation. Not only does this allow you to choose the exact pihole version you want (a bare metal install only supports the latest version), but it allows you to centralize your configuration files neatly under a docker volume, so you only have to backup the volume.
I waffled back and forth on a docker install. Outside of the initial panic to reinstall the OS (Ubuntu 24.04 for me), it was relatively straightforward outside of the config. It may be worth it to dockerize it so I can git control the config but not sure how easy it is under v6. They really changed how the files are parsed.
Before pihole was essentially a frontend for dnsmasq but it seems like it’s a bit more than that now. I haven’t had the chance to look too much under the hood.
If I’m being honest, I’ve wanted to off-load pihole to my router but lack the time and patience these days. I’ve reached the point in my life where IT isn’t the most important thing anymore and just need it to work.
I’d say part of it comes down to what your log level is set at. My pi-hole ran on the pi for like 3-4 years before it destroyed the sd card and crashed. I know some people make immutable filesystems for them etc. If you’re writing to the sd card it’s just a matter of when, not if it will fail.
I didn’t have a problem on my Pi-hole for a very long time too. OP has that probably because s/he’s using it as a DHCP server as well.
Certainly possible though not so versed in Pihole capabilities that I can imagine how that happens…
My DHCP is handled by an EdgerouterX…
My Pihole is limited to DNS only.
I’ve a single Pihole instance running on a RPi 4 and have experienced not a single instance of any of the 3 probs you mention. Except, of course, the very few minutes it takes for a reboot which I can schedule and am aware when it’s happening…
Yeah, I believe it can vary depending on how you host it.
In my experience whenever I brought down the PiHole instance (Docker Compose) I would lose all internet access, which is expected since I’m essentially taking away my devices one and only library, so to mitigate this I spun up PiHole on another device and set that as my secondary (backup) DNS resolver.
This way I can take a container down, update it and all without losing resolution to the internet.
Right, I didn’t have any issues running it on a pi for years too. The problems came when I started messing with things. So, really my advice is to help save people from ideas like mine.
I decided one day to take a bunch of old laptops and create a proxmox cluster out of them. It worked great, but I didn’t have a use for them, I was just playing. So, I decided to retire the pi and put the pihole on the cluster. HA for the win!
I did that and came woke up a few days later to my family complaining that they had no internet. I found the pihole container on a different node and it wouldn’t start. Turns out with proxmox you need separate storage for HA to work. I had assumed that it would be similar to jboss clustering which I’m familiar with, and the container would be on all the nodes and only one actice at a time, with some syncing between nodes. Nope.
What’s worse is the container refused to move back to the origional node AND wouldn’t start. The pi was stored away at this point so I figured it would be easier to just create a new container, but duh, no internet. Turn off dns settings on the router, bam have internet.
Eventually set up the old pi again, and it took me a while to figure out what I had done wrong with proxmox. But while I was figuring it out it was nice to have the backup.
Now I always have two running on different hardware, just in case.
The problems came when I started messing with things
🤷♂️
SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 1 hour ago
Raspberry Pies (is that how you pluralize it?), and especially their SD cards are not the most reliable pieces of hardware. I’ve already had a few die on me.
As for how annoying outages are, I guess that depends on how many people and services you have on your network relying on a functioning DNS. I am running two pihole instances on separate hardware in a keepalived virtual IP setup, with a replicated configuration. Sounds complicated, but it’s really easy.
It’s just nice to be able to reboot or perform maintenance on my pihole knowing it won’t impact DNS, and not having to worry about interrupting my girlfriend streaming her Netflix series or whatever. For example, just a couple of weeks ago I converted my bare-metal pihole installation to a dockerized one, which was a couple of hours of work, without any DNS downtime at all.