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 love it! It took me a bit to iron out all the kinks with my network, but I am completely happy with it now.
I use technitium, but there is nothing “wrong” with using a pihole. I used to run several (containers, plus one physical), and have set up quite a few for family and friends.
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 have that virtualized, times three. Two to have a failover, and third one with different settings for my kids (cloudflare’s family dns)
Holy moly. Mine is virtualized as well, but with no fail overs.
I use a RPi 5 running docker for: Pi-Hole, Jellyfin, Home Assistant, Heimdall. Works great, and there’s still capacity left to add more services.
It’s amazing what you can do with modern computers. The number of services you are running on that RPi 5 is impressive.
Hadn’t heard of Heimdall until you mentioned it. That looks like a fun tool to use.
Hadn’t heard of Heimdall
If you’re looking for a dashboard, there are quite a few of them. I use Homarr, but there is:
…
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.
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 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 switched to github.com/0xERR0R/blocky
Pihole was fine, but had features I didn’t care (mostly UI). Blocky is much smaller and lightweight
randombullet@programming.dev 20 hours ago
I just use adguard home. Worker a little better in my docker setup.