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.

  • LordCrom@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    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 .

  • CannedYeet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    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.

  • curbstickle@anarchist.nexusEnglish
    4·
    3 days ago

    I use technitium, but there is nothing “wrong” with using a pihole. I used to run several (containers, plus one physical), and have set up quite a few for family and friends.

  • bobthecowboy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    3 days ago

    PiHole 4b powering my home DNS. Been running for ~4 years as of next month (and still on the original SD card I installed it to!). 100% recommend.

    • metaStatic@kbin.earth
      6·
      3 days ago

      and still on the original SD card

      incredibly lucky. my Pi burned through so many cards I wouldn’t use it for a pihole again, especially when mini pcs are better and cheaper

      (and before anyone asks yes I was logging to ram)

      • The_Jit@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        3 days ago

        3B on the original SD card still. But I also use log2ram to help reduce writes to the SD card.

  • beerclue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • iegod@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      What I like about running a dedicated physical deployment of pihole (and only pihole) is better reliability, especially when using at for DNS. If a VM host has any issues, the network will lose DNS services. This is much more likely to occur the more layers and services you run on that host.

      A friend recently had this happen while they weren’t home and their family went mad as they lost useful internet access - some necessary for remote work.

  • ORbituary@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    12·
    3 days ago

    Indispensible.

    A longer answer would come out of: “What do you think of a home lab environment without Pi-Hole?”

  • _spiffy@piefed.caEnglish
    4·
    3 days ago

    I love it! It took me a bit to iron out all the kinks with my network, but I am completely happy with it now.

  • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • iturnedintoanewt@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      3 days ago

      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.

    • nfreak@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • mmmac@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        Technitium is much easier to set up than pihole/adguard IMO, as it supports recursive resolving or DoH/DoT out of the box.

        It also supports mirroring root servers, clustering etc. I switched last week and I’m very happy with it

  • pound_heap@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    I’m running one Pi-hole, but not on RPi. One is an LXC container on my Proxmox host, another is on dedicated Dell Wyse thin client box.

  • Sanctus@anarchist.nexusEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    My pi 1b handles the internal DNS for my game servers, which at this point is actually just minecraft because PSO:BB was way harder to setup than I thought. It works and it is extremely easy and it still holes all the tracking stuff too.

  • sylver_dragon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    3 days ago

    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.

      • sylver_dragon@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        Ya, I actually run both uBlock Origin and NoScript in my browser on my phone and personal machine (desktop). On my work laptop, those are a no-go. So, I get the full ads experience on my work machine when traveling.

  • amateurcrastinator@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • Aganim@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      10 hours ago

      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.