A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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If you run a single DNS server, you will always have downtime when it's restarted.
The only way to mitigate that, is to run 2 DNS servers.
I setup my network to use pihole as the first DNS and the router as the second, most of the time pihole is used. Unless it's down
Just be sure that the second server in the list is also a black hole. If you don't, all black holed requests will fallback to the second DNS... which, if it doesn't also black hole them, will wind up serving you ads and defeating the point!
Personally I find a single Pi is just fine for DNS. It only takes like 10 seconds to reboot. Less, if you use M.2 storage via a HAT or boot from USB! That's pretty fine downtime. But if you're afraid you'll knock over the network and get yelled at by your family or housemates, best to use a backup :)
How do you set up clients so they will always use the first one? I thought if a client knows 2 servers they will switch between them.
I plan to add a second Pihole at some point and keep them synced
Yeah, you can't. There is no guarantee that clients will use dns servers in any particular order.
The **ONLY** DNS server you should have set on your network is a/the PiHole(s).
That's what I thought. Btw, your formatting seems to be broken.
Thanks for that; the formatting is broken.
I’ll try and figure out how to fix it (it was formatted for the “site that shall not be named”)
Are you using pihole to also create custom local DNS records?
Yes, mostly just the hostnames
The **ONLY** DNS server you should have set on your network is a/the PiHole(s).
Why wouldn't you just use DNS on your router
Router may not have a function you want.
Instead of paying for a raspberry Pi you could just get a OpenWRT device. You can get the router equivalent of a rust bucket since chances are you are not using the Wireless portion anyway.
Sure, OpenWRT is good and there’s an Adguard Home plugin for it. You don’t need to buy any hardware to use Pihole though, many people run it in a container on an existing machine. So it comes down to the functionality you need or want and the software you prefer, right?
For a critical service like DNS, I decided to set it up bare metal on a Raspberry Pi 2 (even a Pi Zero should work). It's been working fine for years, I just update it from time to time. That way I can mess with my homelab without worrying about DNS issues.
Funny enough, the Pi Zero uses the CPU from the 3 and the Zero 2 uses the CPU from the 3+, so they're both more powerful than a 2 anyway :)
Pi Zero uses the CPU from the 3
No, the original Pi Zero uses the CPU of the Pi1 (only clocked higher). So it is quite a bit slower than a Pi 2, since it has only a single ARMv6 CPU core. Still fine for a DNS server on a typical home network.
Aha, thank you. Shouldn't have riffed from memory on that one, I suppose!
But very much agreed: the Zero series has plenty of beef for a DNS server. Maybe when the 3 comes out I'll add one as a backup for my 4 server.
I am running AdGuard Home DNS, not PiHole.. but same idea. I have AGH running in two LXCs on proxmox (containers). I have all DHCP zones configured to point to both instances, and I never reboot both at the same time. Additionally, I watch the status of the service to make sure it’s running before I reboot the other instance.
Outside of that, there’s really no other approach.
You would still need at least 2 DNS servers, but you could setup some sort of virtual IP or load balancing IP and configure DHCP to point to that IP, so when one instance goes down then it fails over to the other instance.
Running unbound on my opnSense with the appropriate blacklists for ad filtering.
spin up a second pihole docker and upgrade them separately so they can failover to the other one while upgrading. I do not have an issue with 20min lose of DNS after updating my pi.hole docker, but I did spin up a second one when I wanted to try unbound+pi.hole and just kept them both up/running.
spin up a second pihole docker and upgrade them separately so they can failover to the other one while upgrading.
Think I’m going to take this advice and put it in action! Thank you!
I think something else may be wrong if it breaks for 20 minutes. How long does it take for compose to bring the stack up?
Also assuming you run ntpd or chrony, it should always keep your clock in sync.
I think something else may be wrong if it breaks for 20 minutes.
When I originally setup my PiHole many, many, many months ago when I was still learning the Docker engine I had little to no issue.
I don’t know what caused it either being a power-outage or network loss but ever since I’ve been experiencing DNS related issues (I suspect it’s NTP not syncing), some days I’ll wake up before work realizing “oh shit I have no internet access” frantically trying to fix the issue.
I think i might take the advice of other commenters here and host two PiHole servers on separate devices/stacks, just got to hope my router supports it.
I run my pi-hole on a dedicated Pi, and I pull the updated image first without any trouble. Then after the updated image is pulled, recreating the container only takes a few seconds.
Dunno what's broken about your setup, but it definitely sounds like something unusual to me.
This is overkill.
I have a dedicated raspberry pi for pihole, then two VMs running PowerDNS in Master/Slave mode. The PDNS servers use the Pihole as their primary recursive lookup, followed by some other Internet privacy DNS server that I can't recall right now.
If I need to do maintenance on the pihole, power DNS can fall back to the internet DNS server. If I need to do updates on the PowerDNS cluster, I can do it one at a time to reduce the outage window.
EDIT: I should have phrased the first sentence: "My setup is overkill" rather than "This is overkill" - the Op is asking a very valid question and the passive phrasing of my post's first sentence could be taken multiple ways.
The **ONLY** DNS server you should have set on your network is a/the PiHole(s).
Sorry, I wasn't clear - I use PowerDNS so that I can more easily deploy services that can be resolved by my internal networks (deployed via Kubernetes or Terraform). In my case, the secondary PowerDNS server does regular zone transfers from the primary in order to ensure it has a copy of all A, PTR, CNAME, etc records.
But PowerDNS (and all DNS servers really), can either be authoritative resolvers or recursors. In my case, the PDNS servers are authoritative for my homelab zone/domain and they perform recursive lookups (with caching) for non-authoritative domains like google.com, infosec.pub, etc. By pointing my PDNS servers to PiHole for recursive lookups, I ensure that I have ad blocking while still allowing for my automation to handle the homelab records.
2 pihole instances 1 pi5 1 pi4 Keepalived provides vrrp at a set address.
Instances kept in sync via orbital
1 goes down the other takes over.
Quite elegantly.
I'm looking into Technitium, which doesn't get a ton of attention here. It looks to be much more feature packed than PiHole (DNS over HTTPS, for example), and similar to AdGuard Home.
Man, I was excited about Technitium, but I've had a hell of a time trying to get it to work. I'm not sure if it's intended to be on a DMZ in order to get TLS working or something, but I've not been able to get it to acknowledge a single DNS request, even when I think I've shut down DNSSec entirely.
I don't rely on it, but for guests etc I use adblock on OpenWrt with https://oisd.nl/. It's supposed to have no false positives
How do you host your DNS sinkhole/resolver?
Like this, baby:
services.adguardhome = {
enable = true;
mutableSettings = false;
openFirewall = true;
settings = {
dns = {
# Web Interface
bootstrap_dns = ["9.9.9.9" "149.112.112.112"];
upstream_dns = ["https://dns.quad9.net/dns-query"];
fallback_dns = ["tls://dns.quad9.net"];
};
filters = [
{
name = "AdGuard DNS filter";
url = "https://adguardteam.github.io/HostlistsRegistry/assets/filter_1.txt";
enabled = true;
}
];
filtering = {
blocked_services = {
ids = [
];
};
protection_enabled = true;
filtering_enabled = true;
rewrites = [
];
};
Deploy to the main home server, and the backup instance. NixOS is fucking awesome. No sync tool needed.
How do I use nixos for docker? I've tried before but what I want is to be able to pull docker compose from a git and deploy it. I haven't been able to find an easy way to do that on docker
Most of the time you don't need docker. NixOS isolates runtimes.
That being said, you could use nix to build the docker container, and then run it using the built-in oci-container options.
Two lxc's, one pi 3b.
I would do a single instance of Pihole. If you need HA there are ways to do that. If you need something more switch to a proper DNS service.
I run 2 separate adguard home containers on separate hosts and set DNS for both IPs. If I take one down, requests just get sent to the other.
I run Pihole+Unbound, Debian baremetal on a tinypc. RPi was too unreliable. I was too often dealing with issues.
My router is the failback, as it has blocking too.