3 ms·

I went from PiHole -> AdGuard -> NextDNS. My patience for tinkering and maintaining wasn't high enough to not just pay someone else to do it :)

vosper 2y ago
Yeah +1 for NextDNS. It's so easy to setup and manage, and works really well.
LeoPanthera 2y ago
The big benefit of running a DNS server locally is caching. Using any external provider means you have to go out to the internet for every single request. With a local server, most requests are fulfilled from the local cache.
- Novosell 2y ago
  Hmmm, my router caches DNS queries.
- pseufaux 2y ago
  You can run NextDNS on your router to solve this.
- natrys 2y ago
  You can just run something like dnsmasq locally though.
mrmuagi 2y ago
Same except skipping AdGuard. Having the DNS live on a pi sounded like fun for me but it gave me stress due to power outages. There is safety in knowing you aren't adding a point of failure that only you know how to solve. I also had issues with adding backup DNS, since a backup DNS would be queried if the pihole blocked the DNS query -- so I would have to maintain two seperate blocklists, one local and one offsite.
- LeoPanthera 2y ago
  I run AdGuard Home on the same device as my router, so anything that would take it down would also take down the entire router anyway.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- martin_a 2y ago
  I think my PiHole is up for 3+ years on a Raspberry Pi dedicated to that task. Did not fail once since then, so not sure if "DNS is going down" is really an issue. But maybe I've got survivorship bias.
  - brummm 2y ago
    Living in a North American city with power wires being above ground, I have had so many power outages in the last five year, it was kind of a crazy thing to get used to. My Pi would not deal well with power outages when running through the SD card and so I stopped using it.
    - sizzle 2y ago
      I ran it on an old laptop and never had issues. The extra ram and cpu + actual disk hd gave me ~99% uptime even after power outage no sd card corruption. Laptop auto rebooted on crash too.
    - eldaisfish 2y ago
      I've had a raspberry pi and pihole going on the same SD card for approximately seven years now. I also regularly reboot the pi by simply cycling power. The solution was fairly simple. Send the linux log files to /dev/null (or whatever it is actually called, i.e. RAM) and disable query logging in pihole. That's it. Helps greatly!
  - mrmuagi 2y ago
    I live in Vancouver BC, we have a power outage every 1-2 years due to high winds or fallen power poles. I noticed some devices on my home network whilst connected to power have power quality issues too, no doubt a UPS would help here.
sph 2y ago
I used to use NextDNS, but pi-hole is such low maintenance it makes no sense to pay for a third party service and additional latency to do ads filtering. I set up pi-hole on an Arch Linux for ARM installation on a rPI 3 like 5 years ago and haven't touched it since. Still chugging along nicely.
pixxel 2y ago
[dead]

vosper 2y ago

Yeah +1 for NextDNS. It's so easy to setup and manage, and works really well.

LeoPanthera 2y ago

The big benefit of running a DNS server locally is caching. Using any external provider means you have to go out to the internet for every single request. With a local server, most requests are fulfilled from the local cache.

Novosell 2y ago
Hmmm, my router caches DNS queries.
pseufaux 2y ago
You can run NextDNS on your router to solve this.
natrys 2y ago
You can just run something like dnsmasq locally though.

mrmuagi 2y ago

Same except skipping AdGuard. Having the DNS live on a pi sounded like fun for me but it gave me stress due to power outages. There is safety in knowing you aren't adding a point of failure that only you know how to solve. I also had issues with adding backup DNS, since a backup DNS would be queried if the pihole blocked the DNS query -- so I would have to maintain two seperate blocklists, one local and one offsite.

LeoPanthera 2y ago
I run AdGuard Home on the same device as my router, so anything that would take it down would also take down the entire router anyway.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
martin_a 2y ago
I think my PiHole is up for 3+ years on a Raspberry Pi dedicated to that task. Did not fail once since then, so not sure if "DNS is going down" is really an issue. But maybe I've got survivorship bias.
- brummm 2y ago
  Living in a North American city with power wires being above ground, I have had so many power outages in the last five year, it was kind of a crazy thing to get used to. My Pi would not deal well with power outages when running through the SD card and so I stopped using it.
  - sizzle 2y ago
    I ran it on an old laptop and never had issues. The extra ram and cpu + actual disk hd gave me ~99% uptime even after power outage no sd card corruption. Laptop auto rebooted on crash too.
  - eldaisfish 2y ago
    I've had a raspberry pi and pihole going on the same SD card for approximately seven years now. I also regularly reboot the pi by simply cycling power. The solution was fairly simple. Send the linux log files to /dev/null (or whatever it is actually called, i.e. RAM) and disable query logging in pihole. That's it. Helps greatly!
- mrmuagi 2y ago
  I live in Vancouver BC, we have a power outage every 1-2 years due to high winds or fallen power poles. I noticed some devices on my home network whilst connected to power have power quality issues too, no doubt a UPS would help here.

sph 2y ago

I used to use NextDNS, but pi-hole is such low maintenance it makes no sense to pay for a third party service and additional latency to do ads filtering. I set up pi-hole on an Arch Linux for ARM installation on a rPI 3 like 5 years ago and haven't touched it since. Still chugging along nicely.

pixxel 2y ago

[dead]