Comment on Should I use a dedicated DHCP/DNS server hardware
SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 5 months agoThat’s what I do. I do have a small VM that is linked to it in a keepalived cluster with a synchronized configuration that can takeover in case the rpi croaks or in case of a reboot, so that my network doesn’t completely die when the rpi is temporarily offline. A lot of services depend on proper DNS resolution being available.
erre@programming.dev 5 months ago
I’ve been meaning to standup another pihole on another pi for DNS redundancy. I have to research how to best keep the piholes in sync. So far I’ve found orbital-sync and gravity-sync.
dan@upvote.au 5 months ago
If you ever switch to AdGuard Home, adguardhome-sync is pretty good. IMO AdGuard Home is better since it has all of PiHole’s features plus it supports DNS-over-HTTPS out-of-the-box, so your ISP can’t spy on your DNS queries.
SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 5 months ago
You can also do that with running cloudflared or unbound on your pihole.
dan@upvote.au 5 months ago
Sure, but that’s extra manual setup, and the point of running something like PiHole is to have a nice UI to manage things.
AdGuard Home uses DNS-over-HTTPS by default, so it’s immediately more privacy-focused than PiHole.
SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 5 months ago
For me gravity sync was too heavy and cumbersome. It always failed at copying over the gravity sqlite3 db file consistently because of my slow rpi2 and sd card, a known issue apparently.
I wrote my own script to keep the most important things for me in sync: the DHCP leases, DHCP reservations and local DNS records and CNAMES. It’s basically just rsync-ing a couple of files. As for the blocklists: I just manually keep them the same on both piholes, but that’s not a big deal because it’s mostly static information. My major concern was the pihole bringing DHCP and DNS resolution down on my network if it should fail.
Now with keepalived and my sync script that I run hourly, I can just reboot or temporarily shutdown pihole1 and then pihole2 automatically takes over DNS duties until pihole1 is back. DHCP failover still has to be done manually, but it’s just a matter of ticking the box to enable the server on pihole2, and all the leases and reservations will be carried over.