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.

  • perry@aussie.zoneEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    Success story here. 6+ years running pihole on proxmox as my primary DNS for everything on my network. It’s never missed a beat, never crashed. I update infrequently. It’s just good software.

  • Tetsuo@jlai.luEnglish
    31·
    1 day ago

    Anybody got the feeling some games may be negatively affected by a PiHole ?

    It’d not really the reason I stopped using it but I suspected that some games didn’t like it when PiHole was up…

    Anyway this post motivated me to reinstall my RasPi.

    • Aganim@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      Anybody got the feeling some games may be negatively affected by a PiHole ?

      My RPi 2 has been happily running PiHole in my network for about 8 years now and with a number of pretty strict block lists, personally I never had any issues with games.

  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.caEnglish
    19·
    2 days ago

    I installed a Pi-Hole largely to serve as a local DNS, but enabled the ad-blocking 'cause it seemed silly not to. My wife got very upset. Apparently she likes the ads.

    With that aside though, it seems to work quite well. Just make sure to (a) use a reasonably-powered device (my Pi Zero appears to be taxed by it) and you should probably use an Ethernet connection 'cause my Pi Zero regularly flakes out so DNS requests fail due to the IP being “unreachable” for a half second.

    • Darkassassin07@lemmy.caEnglish
      11·
      2 days ago

      My wife got very upset. Apparently she likes the ads.

      Set static IPs for her devices, then whitelist that device IP past the block lists by adding it to a group, then regex allow domain: ‘*’ for that group.

      • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        1 day ago

        Did that with my mother.
        She gets her instagram and facebook, I will block the hell out of it.

    • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      My wife got very upset. Apparently she likes the ads.

      Ahhh the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor). I created a separate vlan just for her when she comes over, and she can have all the ads and crap she wants. Just keep it off my network.

    • mrgoosmoos@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      how does flaking out present itself?

      I had an issue for a long time where the pihole seemed to be bricking the network, and combined with the Eero mesh it was a pain to bring back online each time due to order of operations restarting devices and enabling/disabling DNS on the router

      • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        Basically the IP stops responding to any traffic. At one point I set up a constant ping, and every once in a while I got something like “destination host unreachable”. It doesn’t happen often enough for me to move the service onto a physical device though. That’s work and I’m tired like, a lot.

        • mrgoosmoos@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          2 days ago

          hmm. I wonder if that was what was happening to me

          it hasn’t happened since my ex moved out, so there’s less traffic…

          but I think it actually stopped before that.

  • 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.

  • tomjuggler@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    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.

      • markstos@lemmy.worldEnglish
        101·
        3 days ago

        You have never had some family member experience a broken website that they needed to work but you were not around to fix it on the server side?

        • csm10495@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          4 hours ago

          This. I use pihole as just a DNS server with blocking off since it was too much to have to deal with the random broken pages.

        • Dultas@lemmy.worldEnglish
          31·
          2 days ago

          I set a separate SSID on the wifi without the pihole as the DNS provided by DHCP that they can use.

        • DirtPuddleMisfortune@feddit.orgEnglish
          31·
          2 days ago

          That’s why my wife is raw dogging the internet. I excluded her devices from Pihole after i heard too much “site x is not working”. She bought from some fake shops. I didn’t, thanks to our block list.

  • 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 .

  • sylver_dragon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    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.

  • DonStuttgart1974@feddit.orgEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    I had a look at it but didn’t use it for longer, I used adguard later in a lxc container later, since i didn’t see a point in using a different device, right now the adguard is running as a service on my opnsense so i don’t have to rely on something other than the router for internet. I like the option to block on a dns level, and to be fair it’s always a similar set of blocklists that can be used, the major difference is in the preselection. right now I could probably switch back to the default opnsense dns server and add the lists there, only losing the info on what has been blocked.

  • chillpanzee@lemmy.mlEnglish
    181·
    3 days ago

    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.

  • wersooth@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    1 day ago

    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:

    1. DNS level adblock
    2. Local DHCP server
    3. 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.
  • terminal@lemmy.mlEnglish
    12·
    3 days ago

    I like it but just not on a Pi. I found it too unstable. I found it easier to host in a docker container.

    Although these days i just use blocklists on my router.

    • N0x0n@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      But why not on a Pi, in a docker container? My pi 3bi+ begins to show some age but has been rock solid for 3 years now… I even forget it’s on sometimes ! (Except when nothing gets resolved 😅🤷‍♂️)

      • terminal@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        I eventually moved to docker on the pi. But the pi would randomly go down. I had two of them for redundancy but eventually one of them ended up corrupting its sd card and shortly later the other went down unexpectedly while i was at work and the whole family lost connection without knowing how to fix it.

        Decided to move to to dns blocking on the router. Basically its easy to reboot for the family and has yet to fail (more than a year now).

  • s3rvant@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    2 days ago

    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 :)

    • Sockenklaus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      Ugh, I wish my wife would see this. She’s been complaining that she couldn’t open her Google search results because the links go through some adserver PiHole is blocking (probably their sponsored links). I put her phone on the “don’t block anything at all” list and she’s been happy ever since 🤷

      • s3rvant@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        Yep, that’s exactly what is happening; I’ve seen the same and just kept reminding everyone not to click on ads. Took a while but they actually got it.

  • 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.

    • 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

    • 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.