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.
The number one rule of selfhosting unbound. Make two.
You won’t be happy one morning if you don’t. I run unbound with adblocking on OpenWRT, but if my router dies, my whole network does anyway, so… Eh.
I run 2 instances of pihole/unbound as lxcs on my main server and local back up, works great.
If I didn’t have the two big boxes I’d use my pi4/zero2 to run two instances of pihole/unbound.
If I didn’t have my pis, I’d run 2 instances of pihole/unbound on literally anything I could install it on.
What I’m saying is that I consider pihole/unbound to be essential infrastructure at this point. I’m also trying to say I’ve broken my only instance of pihole enough times to understand the importance of redundancy.
I use Pis as a (sort of) hardware key to get family and friends onto my Tailscale VPN. They all have pihole too. I haven’t convinced any of them to get a pi0 as a redundant box, but I’m sure they’ll learn eventually too. No doubt it’ll be my problem.
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 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
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.
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.
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…
Maybe a controversial take, but I like pihole for blocking only - I have a pair of powerDNS servers set up for my internal name resolution. They recurse to Pihole, but can fall back to internet DNS servers if Pihole isn’t responsive.
I tried pihole for local resolution and found it to be a fairly large pain to automate. Plus kubes has PDNS hooks for auto-updating DNS entries.
Yes.
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?
That’s the reason I no longer have a pihole…
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 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.
@[email protected] pihole is great. I use AdGuard now but either is good. The important thing is having a dns server at home
Agreed. DNS filtering is an important tool for safety, privacy and general well-being.
Indispensible.
A longer answer would come out of: “What do you think of a home lab environment without Pi-Hole?”
Dispensible
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).
