So, check this little idea that I have - I want to browse the internet without all sorts of unscrupulous actors collecting every little bit of metadata on me and my family they can possibly get their hands on.
Interesting… And this is not a criticism, simply an observation…
I’ve a single Pihole instance running on a RPi 4 and have experienced not a single instance of any of the 3 probs you mention. Except, of course, the very few minutes it takes for a reboot which I can schedule and am aware when it’s happening…
Right, I didn’t have any issues running it on a pi for years too. The problems came when I started messing with things. So, really my advice is to help save people from ideas like mine.
I decided one day to take a bunch of old laptops and create a proxmox cluster out of them. It worked great, but I didn’t have a use for them, I was just playing. So, I decided to retire the pi and put the pihole on the cluster. HA for the win!
I did that and came woke up a few days later to my family complaining that they had no internet. I found the pihole container on a different node and it wouldn’t start. Turns out with proxmox you need separate storage for HA to work. I had assumed that it would be similar to jboss clustering which I’m familiar with, and the container would be on all the nodes and only one actice at a time, with some syncing between nodes. Nope.
What’s worse is the container refused to move back to the origional node AND wouldn’t start. The pi was stored away at this point so I figured it would be easier to just create a new container, but duh, no internet. Turn off dns settings on the router, bam have internet.
Eventually set up the old pi again, and it took me a while to figure out what I had done wrong with proxmox. But while I was figuring it out it was nice to have the backup.
Now I always have two running on different hardware, just in case.
I’ve a single Pihole instance running on a RPi 4 and have experienced not a single instance of any of the 3 probs you mention. Except, of course, the very few minutes it takes for a reboot which I can schedule and am aware when it’s happening…
Yeah, I believe it can vary depending on how you host it.
In my experience whenever I brought down the PiHole instance (Docker Compose) I would lose all internet access, which is expected since I’m essentially taking away my devices one and only library, so to mitigate this I spun up PiHole on another device and set that as my secondary (backup) DNS resolver.
This way I can take a container down, update it and all without losing resolution to the internet.
honestly don’t find it necessary. raspberry OS basically never needs to be rebooted and if you really need planned maintenance you can just use a normal DNS server til you’re done.
And what do you set that secondary DNS entry to? Operating systems may use both, so you need the secondary to point to a pi hole or else you’re letting ads through randomly.
The way secondary DNS works is that a client distributes DNS requests across the primary and secondary DNS servers. So if you have pihole as your primary DNS and, say, 8.8.8.8 as your secondary DNS, you’re sending half of your DNS requests to google unfiltered. And if your pihole DNS goes down, half of your DNS queries time out.
The way to have redundancy with DNS is with a standby server that takes over the IP of the primary server if it goes down. You can do this with keepalived.
Adguard Home has been absolutely rock solid for me, and it offers DoT and DoH servers so you can easily connect devices over those protocols if you want to.
I recommend having two. Otherwise your home internet goes down everytime you update or reboot or it crashes.
Interesting… And this is not a criticism, simply an observation…
I’ve a single Pihole instance running on a RPi 4 and have experienced not a single instance of any of the 3 probs you mention. Except, of course, the very few minutes it takes for a reboot which I can schedule and am aware when it’s happening…
🤷♂️
I didn’t have a problem on my Pi-hole for a very long time too. OP has that probably because s/he’s using it as a DHCP server as well.
Certainly possible though not so versed in Pihole capabilities that I can imagine how that happens…
My DHCP is handled by an EdgerouterX…
My Pihole is limited to DNS only.
deleted by creator
Right, I didn’t have any issues running it on a pi for years too. The problems came when I started messing with things. So, really my advice is to help save people from ideas like mine.
I decided one day to take a bunch of old laptops and create a proxmox cluster out of them. It worked great, but I didn’t have a use for them, I was just playing. So, I decided to retire the pi and put the pihole on the cluster. HA for the win!
I did that and came woke up a few days later to my family complaining that they had no internet. I found the pihole container on a different node and it wouldn’t start. Turns out with proxmox you need separate storage for HA to work. I had assumed that it would be similar to jboss clustering which I’m familiar with, and the container would be on all the nodes and only one actice at a time, with some syncing between nodes. Nope.
What’s worse is the container refused to move back to the origional node AND wouldn’t start. The pi was stored away at this point so I figured it would be easier to just create a new container, but duh, no internet. Turn off dns settings on the router, bam have internet.
Eventually set up the old pi again, and it took me a while to figure out what I had done wrong with proxmox. But while I was figuring it out it was nice to have the backup.
Now I always have two running on different hardware, just in case.
🤷♂️
Yeah, I believe it can vary depending on how you host it.
In my experience whenever I brought down the PiHole instance (Docker Compose) I would lose all internet access, which is expected since I’m essentially taking away my devices one and only library, so to mitigate this I spun up PiHole on another device and set that as my secondary (backup) DNS resolver.
This way I can take a container down, update it and all without losing resolution to the internet.
Mine never crashed until the latest major update, now it’s down every time I come home. Am mad
Yep, if you have somewhere to put a docker container or VM you can have redundancy.
honestly don’t find it necessary. raspberry OS basically never needs to be rebooted and if you really need planned maintenance you can just use a normal DNS server til you’re done.
Right, I never said two raspberry pis, I meant two instances. Like one pi and a container run elsewhere.
Huh? Typically you have a secondary DNS entry on your router
And what do you set that secondary DNS entry to? Operating systems may use both, so you need the secondary to point to a pi hole or else you’re letting ads through randomly.
I have two piholes - they serve different DHCP ranges (e.g. 1-100 and 101-250), and option 6 references each other.
Secondary DNS is not for redundancy!
The way secondary DNS works is that a client distributes DNS requests across the primary and secondary DNS servers. So if you have pihole as your primary DNS and, say, 8.8.8.8 as your secondary DNS, you’re sending half of your DNS requests to google unfiltered. And if your pihole DNS goes down, half of your DNS queries time out.
The way to have redundancy with DNS is with a standby server that takes over the IP of the primary server if it goes down. You can do this with keepalived.
Yes especially if you’re using DHCP on Pi-hole
Adguard Home has been absolutely rock solid for me, and it offers DoT and DoH servers so you can easily connect devices over those protocols if you want to.
I just use their free public option. It’s basically as good as pihole. With pihole I still got some ads. I still get some like this.
Great, I recommend having two Adguard Home instances.