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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.
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 .
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.
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 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.
I have my router powering my pi, so rebooting the router will reboot the DNS server.
I use a separate nuc, and even still, rebooting the router is a non-trivial exercise. The internet was wired into the top shelf of a cupboard, so need a step ladder to get to it.
Since getting a second pihole setup I haven't had any issues, so I think I'm okay now. Hopefully it fails over the christmas break when I'm home :D
Could be hardware
I dont think so, because everything else remains up and working. But it certainly could be.
I set up split dns using a phone earlier this year, and it's been fantastic
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.
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?
It's great. Gets things done. I even have it for my office. About 20 people there.
I just use adguard home. Worker a little better in my docker setup.
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
RPI is great but you have to consider SD card wear. It will not last you forever and at one point will fail. At that moment your dns is no more.
I switched to https://github.com/0xERR0R/blocky
Pihole was fine, but had features I didn't care (mostly UI). Blocky is much smaller and lightweight
Doing it.
If it works? Why not
I have run Pihole on 2 physical Pi 4s (DietPi OS) with config sync for 3 years now. Core to the house. Very reliable.
I run pi-hole in docker in the background of our libreelec (Kodi) home entertainment system and it works great. It's a MUST if you have kids, my son has more freedom to use the internet since I know he is mostly covered by extensive block lists. Using raspberry pi 400, we watch Netflix, play Nintendo games, watch YouTube and have a family hard drive for shared photos and files.
I ran pi-hole on my NAS. Then I pointed my router at it to make it the DNS for my whole network. The only problem was it would create issues when I had a power outage. If things didn't start up with the right timing they would get wonky and certain devices would report as not having Internet.
That's why I bought an OpenWRT One so I could install an equivalent to pi-hole on in directly. Though I hit a snag with that and don't currently have that running.
I haven't noticed much of a difference without the pi-hole running (my NAS is dead right now). I think some of my devices had their own DNS settings so they weren't using the config from the router.
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:
Depends on how you do it and what you need from it. I've actually moved on from my Pihole instance, for reasons I'll get into later.
The broad appeal of using Pihole for DNS in a homelab is the ability to route services from domain names on the local host. This can be really useful, especially for "hacking" service availability onto other unintended devices. Additionally, it can be nice for less tech-savvy users who might not be comfortable editing /etc/hosts or just want to check out a service on their phone web browser.
I would generally recommend using an isolated device for Pihole needs; If you're doing work on your home server, you'll probably want all users on your service to keep their internet connection working to not be a burden to others living in your household (if you have others). A raspberry pi is a really good target for a pihole, and even a cheap old/used one from the interwebs can serve you well (I was using one recently on a pi3b and it was no issue.) Keep in mind that you can't really do fallback dns configuration unless you're ok with losing the key feature of pihole (blocking ads and redirecting domains). Notably, I'm actually not a proponent of running all services on individual compute units generally, I just think DNS is special and you don't really want to tie it into docker services to keep a separation between the services and the server, so to speak.
This brings me to the second feature: adblocking. This one is really a mixed bag. Ultimately, I turned this feature off only because it doesn't work for the websites that have arguably the most ad content (youtube, twitch) and really only serves to hurt the smaller players. Sometimes it's great for blocking things like SmartTV advertisements or data encroachments, but it's very hard to block ads from a web domain in a way that doesn't outright block the service itself (so blocking youtube ads without blocking youtube is, seemingly, a fools errand.) I'm willing to hear other people's opinion on this, I just couldn't get this working to a satisfactory degree.
I've abandoned Pihole as a local dns resolver. This is because Tailscale suits my needs and also allows me out-of-house connectivity to things like my music or personal data so my phone never goes out of communication with my home network. When you use tailscale at home, it's generally really good about routing that through your local network instead of the relay, so there shouldn't be that many downsides. Note, I say generally, because there have been times where it goes through a relay unexpectedly which I haven't solved yet (this is likely a local router configuration issue, anyway...)
I notice that you're already familiar with Pihole, but just thought that it would be best to "explain" my thoughts on it in the form of a recommendation/editorial form.