Operation Pi-Hole is a go

brydry

For a few months I’ve had an instance of pi hole running in an LXC on my proxmox machine. Basically just to learn how it works and how to use it. Recently was seriously considering buying a raspberry pi 5 kit. But, acquiring new tech would be a tough sell to the wife. They’re not exactly cheap if you go all in with case/power/nvme hat plus the ssd.

Time to repurpose a p.o.s. laptop I almost trashed. A core i5 Lenovo ideapad that was in pieces. I installed a spare sata ssd and re-assembled it. Once together I knew it would be running under the living room TV next to the cable modem/router.

I opted to go with standard Ubuntu 24.04 LTS because I might give it additional duties and connect it to the tv via hdmi. I gave it a static ip and Pi-Hole installed and set up easily. Really the hardest part was figuring out how to keep the laptop from shutting down or hibernating when the lid was closed. Ran it for a week with just my main PC using it to make sure it was going to do its job. I also made a backup image with rescuezilla “just in case.”

A couple of days ago I changed the DNS settings on the router and now all my networked devices are going through the Lenovo Pi-Hole. The laptop is powered with the same UPS as the modem/router so short term a/c line issues are taken care of. Now, if the proxmox machine is down at least the rest of the network can still use the Pi-Hole.

This was a fun project and thought I would share.

ToNIX

Wait until you replace pi-hole with Adguard Home! It runs as a single executable, it’s written in Go, it’s updatable from the web interface and supports DoT/DoH out of the box.

I’ve had pi-hole break on updates more than I would have liked.

https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome

david3

I ran pi-hole for awhile, and then added dnscrypt-proxy to it to do DoH. I found that dnscrypt-proxy can do most of what pi-hole does, also, so pi-hole was redundant. So now I just run dnscrypt-proxy.

It is cli-only, though. It doesn’t have a GUI interface like pi-hole. So if you like that, it’s good.

I ran pi-hole on a Raspberry Pi 3b+ with 1GB ram, and it ran fine. So you don’t need the latest.

payup

I’m about to do this myself, did you remove the battery?

Prevok

ToNIX I don’t remember what was the issue I had with AdGuard, but I know it was too simple for my needs. I think it had to to with using different DNS forwarder for my daughter to filter stuff. I had to tinker quite a bit Pi-hole, but I was able to do what I needed.

Nowadays, I moved to Technitium, worth having a look. Single binary in C#, works great and the most feature packed IMO.

The big downside of that project is that it’s essentially a one-man project, but he’s been very active in the last few years.

grand_total

Prevok The big downside of that project is that it’s essentially a one-man project, but he’s been very active in the last few years.

That concerns me too, but the source code is all on Github and if the worst comes to worst and I cannot fix a showstopper then there is always AdGuard (which I used before I discovered Technitium).