Selfhosted

I am one of those zillion users. I love it.

@bernhoftbret@lemmy.world pihole is great. I use AdGuard now but either is good. The important thing is having a dns server at home

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.

I run Pi-Hole in a docker container on my server. I never saw the point in having a dedicated bit of hardware for it.
That said, I don't understand how people use the internet without one. The times I have had to travel for work, trying to do anything on the internet reminded me of the bad old days of the '90s with pop-ups and flashing banners enticing me to punch the monkey. It's just sad to see one of the greatest communications platforms we have ever created reduced to a fire-hose of ads.

I use Pi-Hole unbound, and I really like it. However, Technitium seems to be the new favorite and has a lot of bells and whistles that Pi-Hole doesn't. I haven't run Technitium basically because Pi-Hole fits my needs. If I were just starting out, I would probably consider Technitium.

I have pihole running on an old Raspberry Pi B and it just chugs along. Except for the wonky update they put out a few months ago. That took some cleaning up after.
I check the dashboard a few times a day and it's a good way to notice network issues and misbehaving programs.
I'm also running it through cloudflared to encrypt the requests, in case my ISP is snooping on them.

Indispensible.

A longer answer would come out of: "What do you think of a home lab environment without Pi-Hole?"

pihole has got the best UX for DNS management hands down. it's easy, not overly complicated, and perfect for entry-level selfhosting.

the fact that it actively blocks ads is a bonus.

I preferred AdGuardHome over PiHole, but currently my servers are collecting dust as I need to get electrical work done before I can hook them up.

It really sucks…

PiHole 4b powering my home DNS. Been running for ~4 years as of next month (and still on the original SD card I installed it to!). 100% recommend.

It's fine, did the job for me at the time. Just wanted the ad and nasty blocking. Keeping it and the filters up to date is easy.

Now have a pfSense box with pfBlocker-NG, which does essentially the same thing. Also runs Snort as an additional layer, and makes penning in IoT stuff possible.

Yes.

Sadly, it was very bad. I tried it about five years ago on a Pi 4. In less than a year, the Pi crashed five or more times. Once it was due to a faulty SD card, and on several occasions it was due to other software on the Pi crashing. Each time, the internet went down, which made my family unhappy, especially when I was not at home and could not fix it.

I also saw little benefit as I already block ads on all my devices, and my smart home stuff has no internet access at router level.

I haven't tried it since. Should I try again now with redundancy? What are the benefits?

Technitium DNS Server is a bit more feature rich but honesty I would just run a DNS filter on your router

I used pihole for years, but the recent updates made me look for alternatives. There was a major (v6?) update fuckup, but also some random freezes and block lists going missing...

Looking for alternatives, I tried out Technitium. Extremely easy to set up, rock solid, running steady for about 6 months (with frequent updates), and they recently introduced built in high-availability.

To anyone having issues running on a pi it’s likely either or both of the following item -cheap 5v power supply. Yes you can use an old phone charger but it won’t cut it for long term usage. Get a quality unit or better yet the branded pihole charger. We ended up with a Poe hat that it runs off. Sorted Ethernet and power supply.

-memory card. Buy a quality, fast card and you will be fine.

Going on 8 years with my current pi setup. One failure around 6 years in which was the memory card

I have that virtualized, times three. Two to have a failover, and third one with different settings for my kids (cloudflare's family dns)

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.

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.

I prefer using NextDNS, so that it works wherever I am

Maybe a controversial take, but I like pihole for blocking only - I have a pair of powerDNS servers set up for my internal name resolution. They recurse to Pihole, but can fall back to internet DNS servers if Pihole isn't responsive.

I tried pihole for local resolution and found it to be a fairly large pain to automate. Plus kubes has PDNS hooks for auto-updating DNS entries.

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.

Not a fan of Pi-hole itself, but other than that,why not?

(Technitium DNS has some advantages down the road)

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.

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 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.

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 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'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.