Submitted 1 day ago by bernhoftbret@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world
I’ve run Pi-hole in my homelab for years and benefited from using the service. As well as the hands-on education.
With that said, what is everyone else’s experience with the software? Do you use Pi-hole in your homelab setup? I would assume many hundreds of thousands of people use Pi-hole.
I installed a Pi-Hole largely to serve as a local DNS, but enabled the ad-blocking 'cause it seemed silly not to. My wife got very upset. Apparently she likes the ads.
With that aside though, it seems to work quite well. Just make sure to (a) use a reasonably-powered device (my Pi Zero appears to be taxed by it) and you should probably use an Ethernet connection 'cause my Pi Zero regularly flakes out so DNS requests fail due to the IP being “unreachable” for a half second.
My wife got very upset. Apparently she likes the ads.
Set static IPs for her devices, then whitelist that device IP past the block lists by adding it to a group, then regex allow domain: ‘*’ for that group.
Apparently she likes the ads
Must be to most wife thing I’ve ever heard :)))
how does flaking out present itself?
I had an issue for a long time where the pihole seemed to be bricking the network, and combined with the Eero mesh it was a pain to bring back online each time due to order of operations restarting devices and enabling/disabling DNS on the router
Basically the IP stops responding to any traffic. At one point I set up a constant ping, and every once in a while I got something like “destination host unreachable”. It doesn’t happen often enough for me to move the service onto a physical device though. That’s work and I’m tired like, a lot.
My wife got very upset. Apparently she likes the ads.
Ahhh the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor). I created a separate vlan just for her when she comes over, and she can have all the ads and crap she wants. Just keep it off my network.
I am one of those zillion users. I love it.
I feel bad for households without a nerd to set up the family pihole
Like families where nobody cooks
You have never had some family member experience a broken website that they needed to work but you were not around to fix it on the server side?
I had a look at it but didn’t use it for longer, I used adguard later in a lxc container later, since i didn’t see a point in using a different device, right now the adguard is running as a service on my opnsense so i don’t have to rely on something other than the router for internet. I like the option to block on a dns level, and to be fair it’s always a similar set of blocklists that can be used, the major difference is in the preselection. right now I could probably switch back to the default opnsense dns server and add the lists there, only losing the info on what has been blocked.
It’s great. Gets things done. I even have it for my office. About 20 people there.
I run Pi-Hole in a docker container on my server. I never saw the point in having a dedicated bit of hardware for it.
That said, I don’t understand how people use the internet without one. The times I have had to travel for work, trying to do anything on the internet reminded me of the bad old days of the '90s with pop-ups and flashing banners enticing me to punch the monkey. It’s just sad to see one of the greatest communications platforms we have ever created reduced to a fire-hose of ads.
Thats what ublock is for. But yes.
Ya, I actually run both uBlock Origin and NoScript in my browser on my phone and personal machine (desktop). On my work laptop, those are a no-go. So, I get the full ads experience on my work machine when traveling.
I run Pihole on physical Pi’s and once configured to my liking has been quite nice. I’ve even had family compliment that they miss the ad blocking when they leave the home :)
Ugh, I wish my wife would see this. She’s been complaining that she couldn’t open her Google search results because the links go through some adserver PiHole is blocking (probably their sponsored links). I put her phone on the “don’t block anything at all” list and she’s been happy ever since 🤷
Yep, that’s exactly what is happening; I’ve seen the same and just kept reminding everyone not to click on ads. Took a while but they actually got it.
I’m running one Pi-hole, but not on RPi. One is an LXC container on my Proxmox host, another is on dedicated Dell Wyse thin client box.
I ran it on a Pi Zero W for a bunch of years, and it was as stable and problem free as it gets.
Early this year I swapped out my wifi/router for a minipc running OPNsense. I retired the pihole since OPNsense has Unbound built in.
Not a fan of Pi-hole itself, but other than that,why not?
(Technitium DNS has some advantages down the road)
Oh, why don’t you like pi-hole?
Pihole has a few drawbacks when your systen grows - a lot of things then need to be done by hand that others do either automated or at least easier.
Personally I have become very fond of technitium - it does everything you will ever need and the main drawback is that it seems so fucking overwhelming initially. But: Once you figured out that you basically only need 10% of the fields it becomes easier. And it’s fucking solid and just works and works and works.
I prefer using NextDNS, so that it works wherever I am
I like it but just not on a Pi. I found it too unstable. I found it easier to host in a docker container.
Although these days i just use blocklists on my router.
But why not on a Pi, in a docker container? My pi 3bi+ begins to show some age but has been rock solid for 3 years now… I even forget it’s on sometimes ! (Except when nothing gets resolved 😅🤷♂️)
I eventually moved to docker on the pi. But the pi would randomly go down. I had two of them for redundancy but eventually one of them ended up corrupting its sd card and shortly later the other went down unexpectedly while i was at work and the whole family lost connection without knowing how to fix it.
Decided to move to to dns blocking on the router. Basically its easy to reboot for the family and has yet to fail (more than a year now).
I use Pi-Hole unbound, and I really like it. However, Technitium seems to be the new favorite and has a lot of bells and whistles that Pi-Hole doesn’t. I haven’t run Technitium basically because Pi-Hole fits my needs. If I were just starting out, I would probably consider Technitium.
I’ve thought about switching to Technitium but dealing with network tools is a whole can of worms I don’t want to open up again until PiHole or Unbound shits the bed on me lmao. PiHole’s working just fine for what I need it to do.
PiHole’s working just fine for what I need it to do.
Let sleeping dogs lie.
Technitium is much easier to set up than pihole/adguard IMO, as it supports recursive resolving or DoH/DoT out of the box.
It also supports mirroring root servers, clustering etc. I switched last week and I’m very happy with it
I’ll have to check on this one, never heard of it, and unbound has a tendency to randomly fail on me after a few months.
I have Unbound configured on my pihole, it’s been running fine for years.
unbound has a tendency to randomly fail
Huh…what do you do to revive it?
I have pihole running on an old Raspberry Pi B and it just chugs along. Except for the wonky update they put out a few months ago. That took some cleaning up after.
I check the dashboard a few times a day and it’s a good way to notice network issues and misbehaving programs.
I’m also running it through cloudflared to encrypt the requests, in case my ISP is snooping on them.
Same, the og one (v1. 0 with PCB without the holes!) at my parents place runs it for a very long time (the second sinkhole is on proxmox on a beefier server, the Pi is there just bcs I still love it).
I preferred AdGuardHome over PiHole, but currently my servers are collecting dust as I need to get electrical work done before I can hook them up.
It really sucks…
I run a pi-hole on a pi 3 and another in a container in docker. Something rarely goes wrong with both and I have a script that sync them.
I replaced their google with searxng, but in the end, they needed ads for their free to play games, so I had to turn it off for them.
Indispensible.
A longer answer would come out of: “What do you think of a home lab environment without Pi-Hole?”
Dispensible
To anyone having issues running on a pi it’s likely either or both of the following item -cheap 5v power supply. Yes you can use an old phone charger but it won’t cut it for long term usage. Get a quality unit or better yet the branded pihole charger. We ended up with a Poe hat that it runs off. Sorted Ethernet and power supply.
-memory card. Buy a quality, fast card and you will be fine.
Going on 8 years with my current pi setup. One failure around 6 years in which was the memory card
pihole has got the best UX for DNS management hands down. it’s easy, not overly complicated, and perfect for entry-level selfhosting.
the fact that it actively blocks ads is a bonus.
Yes.
I use it on a Raspberry Pi 2B and Orange Pi Zero, both work wonderfully for the task, and it looks like Pi-Hole can work fine even on a router. Both of my SBCs are passively cooled, that’s why I decided to comment on the photo: you don’t need a computer this powerful to run it. As far as I remember, my very first Raspberry Pi (v. 1B or something like that) handled this task very well too. I temporarily retired that SBC in favour of Orange Pi Zero, so I cannot say for sure, but I think that computer had no issues with being fast enough for Pi-Hole. Really, give it a try if you didn’t, it’s ‘install once and forget’ type of software. Perhaps it should be updated periodically, but I don’t manage that. The only nuance with it, you need to have two computers, for the redundancy. Otherwise you’d be heading downtimes when you need to turn off the SBC, or even reboot it.
I used pihole for years, but the recent updates made me look for alternatives. There was a major (v6?) update fuckup, but also some random freezes and block lists going missing…
Looking for alternatives, I tried out Technitium. Extremely easy to set up, rock solid, running steady for about 6 months (with frequent updates), and they recently introduced built in high-availability.
PiHole 4b powering my home DNS. Been running for ~4 years as of next month (and still on the original SD card I installed it to!). 100% recommend.
and still on the original SD card
incredibly lucky. my Pi burned through so many cards I wouldn't use it for a pihole again, especially when mini pcs are better and cheaper
(and before anyone asks yes I was logging to ram)
3B on the original SD card still. But I also use log2ram to help reduce writes to the SD card.
It’s fine, did the job for me at the time. Just wanted the ad and nasty blocking. Keeping it and the filters up to date is easy.
Now have a pfSense box with pfBlocker-NG, which does essentially the same thing. Also runs Snort as an additional layer, and makes penning in IoT stuff possible.
Now have a pfSense box…
Too bad you didn’t go with OPNSense; pfSense is a shit company.
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13615896
Aye it’s on the list to try & potentially swap out when time allows. Probably over the holidays - no work until the new year after the 23rd, so no excuse really :)
I run it in a VM and it’s great
What I like about running a dedicated physical deployment of pihole (and only pihole) is better reliability, especially when using at for DNS. If a VM host has any issues, the network will lose DNS services. This is much more likely to occur the more layers and services you run on that host.
A friend recently had this happen while they weren’t home and their family went mad as they lost useful internet access - some necessary for remote work.
That’s fair, I do have a cluster and failover and so it’s not really a problem
I run pihole without any problems as a docker container. I assume you want to ask how well it works to add custom records, because that’s what you usually do with a dns server.
Adding single records with the web ui works just fine. However, adding wildcards isn’t possible. So you end up attaching a terminal to your container and adding dnsmasq configs yourself. This is a bit poor.
On the other hand: How often do you need to add wildcards? I needed like 2 entries since I set up pihole a few years ago.
Technitium DNS Server is a bit more feature rich but honesty I would just run it on your router
I couldn’t figure out how to setup Pihole with Unbound so I use Technitium. Thank the Lord it exists.
I just use adguard home. Worker a little better in my docker setup.
Sadly, it was very bad. I tried it about five years ago on a Pi 4. In less than a year, the Pi crashed five or more times. Once it was due to a faulty SD card, and on several occasions it was due to other software on the Pi crashing. Each time, the internet went down, which made my family unhappy, especially when I was not at home and could not fix it.
I also saw little benefit as I already block ads on all my devices, and my smart home stuff has no internet access at router level.
I haven’t tried it since. Should I try again now with redundancy? What are the benefits?
A bit of redundancy is key.
I have my primary DNS, pihole, running on an RPI that’s dedicated to it; as well as a second backup version running in a docker container on my main server machine.
Nebula-Sync keeps the two synchronized with eachother, so if a change is made on one, it automatically syncs to the other. (things like local dns records or changes to blocklists).
If either one goes down (dead sd cards, me playing with things, power surges, whatever); the other picks up the slack until I fix the broken one, which is usually little more than re-install, then manually sync them using piholes ‘teleporter’ settings. Worse case, restore a backup (That you’re definitely taking. Regularly. Right?)
Both piholes use Cloudflared (here’s their guide) to translate ALL dns traffic into DOH traffic, encrypting it and using the provider of my choice, instead of my ISP or any other plain DNS. The router hands out both local DNS IPs with DHCP because Port 53 outbound (regular dns) is blocked at the router, so all LAN devices MUST use the local DNS or their own DOH config. Plain DNS won’t make it out.
DNS adblocking isn’t perfect, but it’s a really nice tool to have. Then having an internal DNS to resolve names for local-only services is super handy. Most of my subdomains are only used internally, so pihole handles those DNS records, while external DNS only has the records for publicly accessible things.
Maybe a controversial take, but I like pihole for blocking only - I have a pair of powerDNS servers set up for my internal name resolution. They recurse to Pihole, but can fall back to internet DNS servers if Pihole isn’t responsive.
I tried pihole for local resolution and found it to be a fairly large pain to automate. Plus kubes has PDNS hooks for auto-updating DNS entries.
LordCrom@lemmy.world 40 minutes ago
PiHole works great. I get 20% of requests denied and it really helps keep ads and unwanted sites to a minimum. It was easy to setup. I just update it via ssh once every 60days or so.
The stats are kinda revealing also as to the sites the household uses .