Selfhosted

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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 .

@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 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 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:

1. DNS level adblock
2. Local DHCP server
3. DNS server for routing home stuff As DNS and DHCP is kinda important, I have a separate VM just for adguard and docker registry, 512-2G ram. Then I have 2 VMs running alpine as docker swarm, 8Gb each. It's important to make sure even if your "main" infra goes down, you will still have internet to search and debug - hence the separate VM. Also using an NFS share for persistent storage for the data.

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.

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

(Technitium DNS has some advantages down the road)

It's great. Gets things done. I even have it for my office. About 20 people there.

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.

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 prefer using NextDNS, so that it works wherever I am

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?"

Yes.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.