Submitted 3 months 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 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.
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 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.
I just use adguard home. Worker a little better in my docker setup.
The number one rule of selfhosting unbound. Make two.
You won’t be happy one morning if you don’t. I run unbound with adblocking on OpenWRT, but if my router dies, my whole network does anyway, so… Eh.
I run 2 instances of pihole/unbound as lxcs on my main server and local back up, works great.
If I didn’t have the two big boxes I’d use my pi4/zero2 to run two instances of pihole/unbound.
If I didn’t have my pis, I’d run 2 instances of pihole/unbound on literally anything I could install it on.
What I’m saying is that I consider pihole/unbound to be essential infrastructure at this point. I’m also trying to say I’ve broken my only instance of pihole enough times to understand the importance of redundancy.
I set up split dns using a phone earlier this year, and it’s been fantastic
I started playing with it, but decided that DNS was slightly lower level than I wanted to host myself (personal opion, more power to you if you disagree). Instead, I use NextDNS which gives me great control down to individual devices, blocks ads and malware, and doesn't bring down the internet for my entire home if I have a faulty power supply or SD card or whatever.
Your router has a redundant power supply?
I mostly like it, but over the last few months I’ve had my pihole die randomly during the day, which killed my home network, and I had to walk my partner through rebooting everything.
I’ve now got redundant pihole instances, but I’d really like to know what is going wrong with pihole. Its impossible to replicate, and very sporadic.
Could be hardware
I dont think so, because everything else remains up and working. But it certainly could be.
I used pihole for many many many years, never go back ever again. database crashes, random freeze, UI broke just from an API call and sometime just randomly. Tried on Pi2, Pi3, Pi4, VMs, the result was always the same. then I switched to adguard home, no issue ever since. I’m using it for:
I ran pi-hole on my NAS. Then I pointed my router at it to make it the DNS for my whole network. The only problem was it would create issues when I had a power outage. If things didn’t start up with the right timing they would get wonky and certain devices would report as not having Internet.
That’s why I bought an OpenWRT One so I could install an equivalent to pi-hole on in directly. Though I hit a snag with that and don’t currently have that running.
I haven’t noticed much of a difference without the pi-hole running (my NAS is dead right now). I think some of my devices had their own DNS settings so they weren’t using the config from the router.
I run pi-hole in docker in the background of our libreelec (Kodi) home entertainment system and it works great. It’s a MUST if you have kids, my son has more freedom to use the internet since I know he is mostly covered by extensive block lists. Using raspberry pi 400, we watch Netflix, play Nintendo games, watch YouTube and have a family hard drive for shared photos and files.
RPI is great but you have to consider SD card wear. It will not last you forever and at one point will fail. At that moment your dns is no more.
Yeah, that’s definitely a concern. My first installation shredded its SD card in no time due to each request getting logged and stored on disk. Turning off long term query logging mitigated that issue, for my home network I don’t care about that history anyway.
I have run Pihole on 2 physical Pi 4s (DietPi OS) with config sync for 3 years now. Core to the house. Very reliable.
Doing it.
If it works? Why not
I switched to github.com/0xERR0R/blocky
Pihole was fine, but had features I didn’t care (mostly UI). Blocky is much smaller and lightweight
Sanctus@anarchist.nexus 3 months ago
My pi 1b handles the internal DNS for my game servers, which at this point is actually just minecraft because PSO:BB was way harder to setup than I thought. It works and it is extremely easy and it still holes all the tracking stuff too.