leng - a fast DNS server with adblocking, built for self-hosting

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨nico@r.dcotta.eu⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

A few months ago I went on a quest for a DNS server and was dissatisfied with current maintained projects. They were either good at adblocking (Blocky, grimd…) or good at specifying custom DNS (CoreDNS…).

So I forked grimd and embarked on rewriting a good chunk of it for it to address my needs - the result is leng.

it is fast
it is small
it is easy
you can specify blocklists and it will fetch them for you
you can specify custom DNS records with proper zone file syntax (SRV records, etc)
it supports DNS-over-HTTPS so you can stay private
it is well-documented
can be deployed on systemd, docker, or Nix

I have been running it as my nameserver in a Nomad cluster since! I plan to keep maintaining and improving it, so feel free to give it a try if it also fulfils your needs

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Comments

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BaroqueInMind@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
How does this compare to AdGuard Home?

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- Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  or piHole.
  
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  - ikidd@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Probably speed. I find pihole really slow, and I’m running it as a VM on a Xeon server.
    
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- nico@r.dcotta.eu ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I am working on adding a feature comparison to the docs. But in the meantime: leng has less features (like no web UI, no DHCP server) which means it is lighter (50MB RAM vs 150MB for adguard, 512MB for pihole), and easier to reproducibly configure because it is stateless (no web UI settings).
  
  I believe blocky and coredns are better comparisons for leng than “tries to achieve it all” solutions like adguard, pihole…
  
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  - SpaceRanger@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    My pihole runs at 40MB in an LXC container…
    
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  - blackbarn@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I’ll likely stick with Blocky as it seems to offer similar plus more. But good efforts!
    
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- pimeys@lemmy.nauk.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  You can script this with nix quite easily without needing a UI. For many this is a big plus.
  
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Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters

DNS Domain Name Service/System

PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole)

VPN Virtual Private Network

[Thread #282 for this sub, first seen 15th Nov 2023, 10:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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Strit@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
This looks interesting.

So it’s like PiHole, but written in Go, smaller and faster?

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- nico@r.dcotta.eu ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Yes (much simpler) and also allows you to specify custom DNS, which is very useful for more advanced self-hosted deployments - this is something PiHole is just not built to address
  
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  - ShunkW@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    How is PiHole not built for custom DNS? It literally has an entire management page for that.
    
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SidewaysHighways@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Damn! In a previous comment somewhere else I had just recently shared my dispair at how I hadn’t found an easy to follow self hosted DNS server.

I appreciate this immensely and hope to enjoy it once I figure out how to install!

Keep up any and all good work you feel passionate enough about to crank out helpful things in physical reality.

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- nico@r.dcotta.eu ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  If it’s helpful to you it’s helpful in reality!
  
  If you are having trouble installing or the documentation is not clear, feel free to point it out here or in the issues on github. Personally I think it is simplest to use docker :)
  
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Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
This is awesome. I’ve been looking into DNS servers with ad blocking and this seems to be a perfect fit. And it is packaged for Nix, so I’ll definitely give it a go.

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adam@doomscroll.n8e.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Reads nice but your docs are 404’ing so I can’t investigate much :D

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- nico@r.dcotta.eu ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Ouch, thanks for catching that! Should be good now. Link here for the curious
  
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aclamendo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
So cool! I was looking for something really simple like this recently.

Tossed a PR in there BTW, the template config in Configuration.MD was causing me some issues.

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- nico@r.dcotta.eu ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Thank you for your PR! Keen to hear your feedback after you’ve used it a bit
  
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MonkCanatella@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Does this just use an upstream dns server or can it do recursive resolution like unbound?

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Fewer Letters	More Letters
DNS	Domain Name Service/System
PiHole	Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole)
VPN	Virtual Private Network