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I tried PiHole on a spare PC and ran everyone's DNS through it. Laptops, school Chromebooks, mobile devices. It all works great until it doesn't. Some devices,
by joezydeco 5y ago
I tried PiHole on a spare PC and ran everyone's DNS through it. Laptops, school Chromebooks, mobile devices.
It all works great until it doesn't. Some devices, like Eero routers, completely shit the bed if set to manual DNS and it's unavailable. You'll spend an entire day trying to revive these devices.
PiHole isn't 24/7/365 reliable in my experience either.
I got tired of dealing with it all and turned the box off. Maybe next time.
- NortySpock 5y agoCounter-anecdote: I've got two separate hardwired Raspberry Pi's running PiHole in separate docker containers, and my DHCP (from a TP-Link access point) serves them as primary and secondary DNS servers. I just make sure to reboot them one at a time but otherwise have not had any complaints about availability. I've been running for at least 6 months in this configuration. I do see maybe 5% of the hits on the secondary DNS server as the main DNS server (according to PiHole's metrics), so I presume there's a few queries that are failing over.
- geerlingguy 5y agoI've found much of the same. Though sometimes one of the devices on my network seems to favor the second server for a while, and one time when the two DNS servers were out of sync I couldn't get that conputer to resolve any addresses that weren't synchronized without a reboot. I think the moral is not that pi-hole is bad or risky as OP implies... it's that DNS is never simple and running your own with proper redundancy can sometimes be tricky.
- epmaybe 5y agoAnother counter anecdote - I use eero routers and have it set to manual dns. Downtime lasts maybe ten minutes when things go wrong, it’s usually sufficient to restart the pc running pihole. My last downtime was maybe five months ago.