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Show HN: nextdns.io – A Combination of Cloudflare DNS and Pi-Hole

nextdns.io

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Re: Show HN: nextdns.io – A Combination of Cloudflare DNS and Pi-Hole

#121

Post by dual_basis »

This seems great! I've been wanting to try out Pi-Hole for some time now, but I was concerned about how it might impact the other members of the family who would get annoyed if it made other services stop working. Thanks for making a free beta available as well!

Your setup page is fantastic! Especially appreciate the status indicating if it is set up correctly on the device I am using. I set it up on Linux, which I notice you don't have a tab for, but that should be pretty straightforward to add. (Even though Linux users may, typically, know how to do this themselves, it might be nice to include Linux as a signal that it is truly cross-platform.)

I noticed inconsistent results on Android depending on whether I had it set up via Intra or as DNS-over-TLS in the native Android settings. Internet browsing was similar to on desktop, either way, but my concern is mostly related to video apps, specifically the ones my family use (Hulu, YouTube, CWSeed). On Intra, all the video apps seemed to work but there were still ads in all of them. For DNS-over-TLS CWSeed stopped working entirely, saying "video playback failed". Hulu and YouTube still worked but they also still had ads, while on Desktop they did not!

These are the sort of issues I was concerned about when considering using PiHole for the whole house. Are these things that can be mitigated on your end, or will they require per-device apps to be installed, and potentially even require rooting the device?

(Incidentally, how is it that YouTube and Hulu get around the ad blocker on Android?)

Re: Show HN: nextdns.io – A Combination of Cloudflare DNS and Pi-Hole

#122

Post by oil25 »

nextdns wrote: post #44
ignoramous wrote: post #12

Nice. DNS has grown notoriously complex over the years and it is hard work to run a standards compliant service. Congratulations. A few suggestions: - Auto-detect OS and suggest specific setup instructions right on the landing page? - The website goes blank when I block third-party JavaScript from loading. Can you please see if you can fix that? - simplednscrypt has been handy for me to DoT/DoH/DNSCrypt with AdGuard…

Thanks! > Auto-detect OS and suggest specific setup instructions right on the landing page? It should already pre-select your OS tab on my.nextdns.io on the Setup page? If that's not the case, then it's probably a bug. > The website goes blank when I block third-party JavaScript from loading. Can you please see if you can fix that? Weird, we will have a look. > simplednscrypt has been handy for me to DoT/DoH/DNSCrypt…

> Weird, we will have a look.

What's "weird" is that someone thought to mandate third-party map and chat javascript widgets on what should have been a simple page explaining what the combination of Cloudflare and PiHole is.

Re: Show HN: nextdns.io – A Combination of Cloudflare DNS and Pi-Hole

#124

Post by sneak »

jedberg wrote: post #26
sneak wrote: post #20

Be advised: pi-hole ignores security issues in their product. https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/issues/2704

I’ve been a security professional for 20+ years and I agree with them. You’re complaining about an attack surface that would be more easily explored in a bunch of different ways. I’m not sure why you bring this up on every post vaguely related to pi-hole.

I bring it up just so that people are aware and can make their own decision about risk/benefit when choosing to deploy the software. There is obviously room for opinion on the matter and I specifically am not claiming that the project is bad or should be avoided, just that people using it in a default config out of the box know the risks that that presents.

The “be advised” is just that.

It’s not a big deal, and I think I only mentioned it once before.

Re: Show HN: nextdns.io – A Combination of Cloudflare DNS and Pi-Hole

#125

Post by mthoms »

dual_basis wrote: post #121

This seems great! I've been wanting to try out Pi-Hole for some time now, but I was concerned about how it might impact the other members of the family who would get annoyed if it made other services stop working. Thanks for making a free beta available as well! Your setup page is fantastic! Especially appreciate the status indicating if it is set up correctly on the device I am using. I set it up on Linux, which I n…

FWIW I bought a Raspberry Pi and installed Pi-Hole a few months back. It's been almost flawless for us.

Adding to the domain whitelist and/or disabling the DNS blocking temporarily (in case of issues) is dead simple for anyone in the family. You just need to provide them with the local IP address of your Pi. The GUI - at least for these simple tasks - is quite straight forward.

I agree though, this service looks very promising.

Re: Show HN: nextdns.io – A Combination of Cloudflare DNS and Pi-Hole

#126

Post by jamesog »

7ewis wrote: post #94
nextdns wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be a routing issue (this things need to be tweaked over time). Can you talk to us via the chat on the website so we can debug?

468ms in the UK. 9ms on Cloudflare, 10ms on Google.

There seems to be some routing oddities going on. I'm also in the UK (on AAISP). Sometimes I get ~48ms response, other times 200-300ms.

Looking at mtr I'm occasionally routed to Dallas, Texas. Other times it's correctly routing over my ISP's peering to Vultr.

Re: Show HN: nextdns.io – A Combination of Cloudflare DNS and Pi-Hole

#128

Post by pssflops »

I'm in no-way a power user in this space so the simplicity and descriptions were very helpful and I'm looking forward to supporting this when you release a payment model. Excellent results so far, only a few pages had trouble loading and a simple reload fixed it.

Re: Show HN: nextdns.io – A Combination of Cloudflare DNS and Pi-Hole

#129

Post by raghavdua_cse18 »

Really Cool, I have set up something similar for my family and is paying $20 every month for VPS, I have tried NextDNS and found it be really useful and considering the pricing structure which you mentioned in the comments, your product seems to be a far more affordable option. A few suggestions:

1) Consider launching an App for managing configurations or at least make the current web app a PWA

2) Allow users to create duplicate configurations

3) In the logs section of the analytics page, I saw that some blocked domains were being resolved, it was saying that the domains were manually whitelisted(they were not)

4) Allow adding custom hosts file sources

5) You can create a Windows/MacOS app for updating dynamic IP address(similar to the one provided by OpenDNS)

6) You can give a button to whitelist domains in the log section, just like the one provided by the PiHole in the Query page of its web UI

7) Allow adding multiple domains to whitelist & blacklist at once

8) Allow regex and wildcard blocking

9) Mobile UI is not 100% responsive

Re: Show HN: nextdns.io – A Combination of Cloudflare DNS and Pi-Hole

#130

Post by yegle »

smaps wrote: post #119
_b8r0 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm amazed that on a site called "Hacker News" people are giving you hassle for building your own self-hosted solution rather than handing control of your DNS over to random people, possibly for money down the line. Well done.

The hassle is because of the implication that is super easy to run a self hosted solution. It's a decently complex task that your average person couldn't come close to doing, and many here would still take a bit of time to grok it all.

Hey, I've updated the README and the instruction should be straight forward.

Docker compose file makes everything easily reproducible and I've included working example configs. Not sure how I can further simplify the setup but open to suggestions.

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