3 ms·

Always wanted to do this but if I get a call from home and I am either 1) at work 2) out of town 3) or just not home Then, my family's ability to troubleshoot

Always wanted to do this but if I get a call from home and I am either 1) at work 2) out of town 3) or just not home Then, my family's ability to troubleshoot if PiHole goes down is extremely limited. Even if I had two.

procarch2019 1y ago
They could just switch their dns back to auto (or statically use google/cloudflare/etc depending on how you configure it), no? Then fix it when you’re back. You could also set up 2 ssids depending on your WiFi set up. Point one to pi hole and the other to a different DNS provider. Instruction if pi hole breaks is just switch WiFi.
overfeed 1y ago
What black-swan event would cause would 2 PiHoles go down simultaneously? You could always use a non-PiHole guest-network if your WiFi hardware supports it, and let your family know to use the guest network if the regular network is down. The manual switching might not be necessary as most computers, phones and tablets automatically disassociate from a WiFi network if it's "offline", such as when DNS resolution fails.
- firesteelrain 1y ago
  Power outage due to storm or power surge. I live where there are bad storms
  - overfeed 1y ago
    If you really want to try the pihole, and are worried about corruption you could use a read-only root filesystem and mount /tmp and /var/log on tmpfs ramdisk, alternatively, add "@reboot touch /forcefsck" to force a disk check whenever the Pi(s) reboot, including when power returns after an outage.
ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
One work-around is to get them to modify their wifi connection to use a specific DNS (e.g. Google at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 is easy to remember). I run Pi-hole in docker on a NanoPi that I setup as my router (running OpenWRT). In the rare occurrence that it misbehaves, I could just tell my spouse to power cycle it. I did think of having a failover, but there's always going to be a single point of failure with my ISP router anyhow.
tanx16 1y ago
I run Wireguard in combination with Pi-Hole so I can VPN into my home network to configure anything I need. DuckDNS if you’re on a dynamic DNS provider. It’s also nice to have this since you can get the adblocking when away from home.

procarch2019 1y ago

They could just switch their dns back to auto (or statically use google/cloudflare/etc depending on how you configure it), no? Then fix it when you’re back. You could also set up 2 ssids depending on your WiFi set up. Point one to pi hole and the other to a different DNS provider. Instruction if pi hole breaks is just switch WiFi.

overfeed 1y ago

What black-swan event would cause would 2 PiHoles go down simultaneously? You could always use a non-PiHole guest-network if your WiFi hardware supports it, and let your family know to use the guest network if the regular network is down. The manual switching might not be necessary as most computers, phones and tablets automatically disassociate from a WiFi network if it's "offline", such as when DNS resolution fails.

firesteelrain 1y ago
Power outage due to storm or power surge. I live where there are bad storms
- overfeed 1y ago
  If you really want to try the pihole, and are worried about corruption you could use a read-only root filesystem and mount /tmp and /var/log on tmpfs ramdisk, alternatively, add "@reboot touch /forcefsck" to force a disk check whenever the Pi(s) reboot, including when power returns after an outage.

ndsipa_pomu 1y ago

One work-around is to get them to modify their wifi connection to use a specific DNS (e.g. Google at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 is easy to remember). I run Pi-hole in docker on a NanoPi that I setup as my router (running OpenWRT). In the rare occurrence that it misbehaves, I could just tell my spouse to power cycle it. I did think of having a failover, but there's always going to be a single point of failure with my ISP router anyhow.

tanx16 1y ago

I run Wireguard in combination with Pi-Hole so I can VPN into my home network to configure anything I need. DuckDNS if you’re on a dynamic DNS provider. It’s also nice to have this since you can get the adblocking when away from home.