Comment on Contract for self-hosting help
TA_Help@piefed.social 11 hours agoWhen looking at installing pi-hole, I found this thread on reddit (RBR850 as a router is trash) explaining that:
Want to have your own DNS pi-hole? Nope, NG is harvesting that data via their DNS proxy that you CAN’T turn off and to apparently support orbilogin.com…when they could have just used Bonjour and not had to hijack it’s usability. Without static IP’ing everything in the house, you can’t use your DNS to see things that may potentially be compromised because all DNS traffic coming from DHCP-connected devices…now comes from your gateway rather than your device. Causing rate limit issues on your pihole and causing your entire network to go down due to failed DNS if you’re not running a dual stack.
Want VLANs? The option is there…does it work? Not correctly.
No prizes for guessing which router I have. Yay! The OP mentioned using it as an AP instead with a real router in front of it, which would require a new router.
All this to say, I have actually given this thought and done some reading. Sometimes my brain just makes my life unnecessarily hard, and I’ve learned when to admit I need individual help. So thank you for all your time replying to me, but I still want to hire someone.
IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 9 hours ago
Even if your router acts as an DNS proxy it shouldn’t overload any pihole installation unless you have a crapload of devices doing millions of queries per hour. My pihole manages all my devices (20-30 individual things) without any problems and even if I hit some rate limit it’s going to be a change to default configuration, not a immovable object on your way. Based on quick glance over that reddit thread a new router might be a good option, but that’s another easy-ish task to accomplish. I use mikrotik device and I’m pretty happy with it but there’s a ton of good options.
For hiring someone to coach you I can see quite a few of potential issues. People who claim to know what they’re talking about but don’t really have the knowledge, straight up scammers obviously, mismatch in personal chemistry which will make learning unnecessarily difficult or even impossible, some people just aren’t good at teaching even if they do know their stuff and so on. By all means, use your money however you like, but I personally strongly advice against it unless you can get some courses on (preferably local) reputable vendor. You can look for online courses too, cisco has a ton of courses on networking, redhat has plenty of linux courses and other big players have their own training and even certificates if you want to go that far.