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 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.
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?
This. I use pihole as just a DNS server with blocking off since it was too much to have to deal with the random broken pages.
That’s the reason I no longer have a pihole…
I set a separate SSID on the wifi without the pihole as the DNS provided by DHCP that they can use.
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 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.
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 ran it on a Pi Zero W for a bunch of years, and it was as stable and problem free as it gets.
Early this year I swapped out my wifi/router for a minipc running OPNsense. I retired the pihole since OPNsense has Unbound built in.
I like it but just not on a Pi. I found it too unstable. I found it easier to host in a docker container.
Although these days i just use blocklists on my router.
But why not on a Pi, in a docker container? My pi 3bi+ begins to show some age but has been rock solid for 3 years now… I even forget it’s on sometimes ! (Except when nothing gets resolved 😅🤷♂️)
I eventually moved to docker on the pi. But the pi would randomly go down. I had two of them for redundancy but eventually one of them ended up corrupting its sd card and shortly later the other went down unexpectedly while i was at work and the whole family lost connection without knowing how to fix it.
Decided to move to to dns blocking on the router. Basically its easy to reboot for the family and has yet to fail (more than a year now).
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I used to keep a backed up base image to reflash a corrupted sd card. But after the 3rd or 4th time i knew i had to find a better solution.
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 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.Same, the og one (v1. 0 with PCB without the holes!) at my parents place runs it for a very long time (the second sinkhole is on proxmox on a beefier server, the Pi is there just bcs I still love it).
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’ve thought about switching to Technitium but dealing with network tools is a whole can of worms I don’t want to open up again until PiHole or Unbound shits the bed on me lmao. PiHole’s working just fine for what I need it to do.
PiHole’s working just fine for what I need it to do.
Let sleeping dogs lie.
Technitium is much easier to set up than pihole/adguard IMO, as it supports recursive resolving or DoH/DoT out of the box.
It also supports mirroring root servers, clustering etc. I switched last week and I’m very happy with it
I’ll have to check on this one, never heard of it, and unbound has a tendency to randomly fail on me after a few months.
I have Unbound configured on my pihole, it’s been running fine for years.
unbound has a tendency to randomly fail
Huh…what do you do to revive it?
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…
Indispensible.
A longer answer would come out of: “What do you think of a home lab environment without Pi-Hole?”
Dispensible
It’s great. Gets things done. I even have it for my office. About 20 people there.
