Comment on Self-Hosting a DNS Sinkhole is really important

• stratself@lemdro.id ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I’d prefer Adguard Home. Does the same thing but also supports encrypted DoT/DoQ/DoH upstreams. And the UI looks a bit neater for me

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  • lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    AdGuard looks like a paid SaaS service though? No way am I paying for someone else running a device on my network, no friggin way

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    • Flying_Hellfish@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      AdGuard Home is free. I’m running 2 redundant docker containers on separate hosts with adguard sync all for free.

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      • jjlinux@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Yup, I have it installed in my OPNSense and together they make a fucking fortress

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• kmartburrito@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Yeah but what you will eventually find, if reliability matters at all to you, is that the pihole isn’t the best for this. For one, many run on an SD card, which isn’t really stable long-term (I started here and had to fix it due to SD card corruption quite a few times). Second, you don’t have a backup. DNS not running when your machines depend on it equals an immediate outage across ALL devices (as long as you have it configured at your router level, which you should be doing, right?).

  Technitium (and others) solve this problem gracefully.

  I started with pihole (ad blocking) and unbound (recursive DNS), and that was a pain to set up properly.

  Moved do technitium (which offers all of these in one package) plus the ability to natively cluster a second instance (so you have a backup load balanced instance for this critical service)

  The best part is that setting it up if you have an old laptop or desktop running docker is incredibly simple. I had two nodes up and running clustered in less than 15 minutes. Took less time than setting up one pihole.

  If you don’t have docker it may take more time, but that’s the slippery slope of setting up a homelab and running services like this.

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  • lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    My Pi hole has been up and solid for about a decade now, so not sure “isn’t really stable long term” is landing

    Thank you for the in-depth explanation, Technitium sounds really involved. I just plunked down a pi hole, turned it on, and it’s been working for years and years. I’ll keep this in mind though if I ever want to drive myself nuts with networking

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    • kmartburrito@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Good for you, many don’t have the same experience. Technitium is easier to set up in my experience, but you do you if it works for you. That’s the benefit of having free choices.

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  • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    No backup with PiHole?

    PiHole can run redundant if you want. Does Technitium do this differently? Or more easily?

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    • kmartburrito@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Technitium does this incredibly easily. I fiddled with pihole and unbound for so long to get them to coexist properly, and pihole alone before that. The pihole part was easy although unreliable on a raspberry pi due to the sd card. It was better once I added an ssd to the pi, but it didn’t have recursive DNS. Adding unbound and getting them configured properly and coexisting properly wasn’t an easy task. Technitium has all of this in one package and was trivial to set up one or more clustered nodes. You don’t need anything to ensure they both work together, the clustering feature does this incredibly easily. One goes down? No prob, I see a discord alert from uptime kuma letting me know. When it comes back up cluster mgmt syncs everything and they load balance again.

      My current setup has an uptime of 210 days, and likely would be longer if it weren’t for a power outage.

      It really is so simple, I’d suggest everyone try it out. You can always change it back if you don’t like it. And, like the pihole, you can load curated block lists.

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• Ooops@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  If you just want simple ad blocking you don’t actually need pi hole for it’s web interface you don’t ever look at once it runs. Unbound alone can do the job with minimla configuration.

  Nowadays I even changed my setup to dnsproxy, which doesn’t even need any config. It’s just a handful parameters when you start it. And it does all the filtering for my home network as well as providing DoH access for when I’m not at home and connected from somewhere else.

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