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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
Did that with my mother.
She gets her instagram and facebook, I will block the hell out of it.
Apparently she likes the ads
Must be to most wife thing I’ve ever heard :)))
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.
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.
hmm. I wonder if that was what was happening to me
it hasn’t happened since my ex moved out, so there’s less traffic…
but I think it actually stopped before that.
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 .
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 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.
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 am one of those zillion users. I love it.
I feel bad for households without a nerd to set up the family pihole
Like families where nobody cooks
You have never had some family member experience a broken website that they needed to work but you were not around to fix it on the server side?
I set a separate SSID on the wifi without the pihole as the DNS provided by DHCP that they can use.
That’s the reason I no longer have a pihole…
That’s why my wife is raw dogging the internet. I excluded her devices from Pihole after i heard too much “site x is not working”. She bought from some fake shops. I didn’t, thanks to our block list.
My 65 yo mother can disable and enable the 2 piholes on her home network when she needs to and she’s not a techie. How are people so incompetent?
She sounds like a techie
Not at all. She knows how to use a browser and login credentials. It’s not like she’s gotta SSH into the thing with CLI.
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 🤷
Yep, that’s exactly what is happening; I’ve seen the same and just kept reminding everyone not to click on ads. Took a while but they actually got it.
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 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.Thats what ublock is for. But yes.
Ya, I actually run both uBlock Origin and NoScript in my browser on my phone and personal machine (desktop). On my work laptop, those are a no-go. So, I get the full ads experience on my work machine when traveling.
I prefer using NextDNS, so that it works wherever I am
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.
