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.
Edit #1:
The image attached to this post is my RPi 5, which hosts the Pi-hole software. Big supporter of the whole “SBCs for learning and home improvement” mentality.
Edit #2:
It is interesting to see the broad support for Pi-hole and DNS blockers in general. The more options, the healthier the tech ecosystem is, which benefits everyone.
Success story here. 6+ years running pihole on proxmox as my primary DNS for everything on my network. It’s never missed a beat, never crashed. I update infrequently. It’s just good software.
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:
- DNS level adblock
- Local DHCP server
- DNS server for routing home stuff As DNS and DHCP is kinda important, I have a separate VM just for adguard and docker registry, 512-2G ram. Then I have 2 VMs running alpine as docker swarm, 8Gb each. It’s important to make sure even if your “main” infra goes down, you will still have internet to search and debug - hence the separate VM. Also using an NFS share for persistent storage for the data.
Anybody got the feeling some games may be negatively affected by a PiHole ?
It’d not really the reason I stopped using it but I suspected that some games didn’t like it when PiHole was up…
Anyway this post motivated me to reinstall my RasPi.
Anybody got the feeling some games may be negatively affected by a PiHole ?
My RPi 2 has been happily running PiHole in my network for about 8 years now and with a number of pretty strict block lists, personally I never had any issues with games.
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 .
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Apparently she likes the ads
Must be to most wife thing I’ve ever heard :)))
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.
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’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 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 having downtimes when you need to turn off the SBC, or even reboot it.
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 🤷
I prefer using NextDNS, so that it works wherever I am
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.
