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 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:
- DNS level adblock
- Local DHCP server
- 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 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 .
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 :)
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.
Yeah, that’s definitely a concern. My first installation shredded its SD card in no time due to each request getting logged and stored on disk. Turning off long term query logging mitigated that issue, for my home network I don’t care about that history anyway.
It’s great. Gets things done. I even have it for my office. About 20 people there.
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.
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.
unbound has a tendency to randomly fail
Huh…what do you do to revive it?
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 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 run it in a VM and it’s great
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.
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 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.
