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Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

brianchristner.io

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Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#81

Post by majkinetor »

mFixman wrote: post #69
prometheus1909 wrote: post #35

I keep seeing posts about Pi Holes and it looks good, but I have previously dealt with ads by appending their delivering sites to my /etc/hosts, i.e. 0.0.0.0 trashsite1.com 0.0.0.0 trashsite2.com The only downside I see is that my approach is not network-wide. Any other reasons I should reconsider?

Similarly, why is PiHole better than using a browser ad-blocker?

You should have both. One is for network wide effects, so anything on your network will have ads blocked (smart TV, projector, phones etc.), another is for youtube and friends.

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#82

Post by Brybry »

milgrim wrote: post #61
asdkhadsj wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of cost is associated with pihole, with respect mostly to very latency sensitive things like competitive gaming. Is it problematic?

There should be no cost. Which game will constantly use DNS to resolve addresses after being launched?

I caught a bug related to this in Project Zomboid in an early multiplayer version.

Often when someone joined a server there would be a tiny bit of lag for all of the users.

I figured out the server was using a java method that indirectly was doing a blocking DNS lookup. I think it was reverse DNS but I forget which method it actually was, and if it was blocking the main thread or just the networking thread.

(PiHole still wouldn't have created an additional cost though.)

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#83

Post by aksss »

Deritiod wrote: post #26
Group_B wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of many reasons why I don’t even bother with IoT devices. Don’t need all this crap to be connected to wifi. There was nothing wrong with it before.

It's not crap just because you don't see a benefit. In my opinion, additional being a curios software engineer I find it quite interesting. Necessary? Perhaps not but helpful. Heating valves for example.

Not that I’m terribly experienced with it, but a lot of home automation can be done without “IoT” — specifically without the crapware Trojan controllers that come with consumer solutions from Best Buy. ISY994 for example. Easy solutions for remote access via apps (vpn to home) and notifications as well. It’s not as easy to set up as a plug and play controller from Google, but it’s far more private.

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#84

Post by jamiek88 »

mnd999 wrote: post #39
vladvasiliu wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of just using a PiHole, a hard-coded server would easily get around it. But if the network outright blocks random DNS requests, that only leaves DoH, which would require fixed IPs, which should be able to be detected and blocked, right? Sure, the setup becomes a bit more involved...

Surely you can have firewall redirect rule that bounces all outgoing dns to your Pi hole? This doesn’t work with DNS over https of course.

I can see people MITM their own https traffic in the near future!

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#85

Post by rektide »

jrmg wrote: post #18

Like any other project I run everything in a Docker container, and this project should be no different. What is the advantage of this in this case?

> What is the advantage of this in this case?

That you can manage & think of this machine (program/process/container/vm) the same was as every other machine & dont have to ever ever ever ask "what should i do in this case?" or "what's right for this case?" because it's a unified answer that works well & operates the same everywhere.

Uniformity & no special cases. Death to pitiful old ways.

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#86

Post by 867-5309 »

kayson wrote: post #15

While the interface may not be as pretty, you can do the same thing if you're running pfsense using the pfblocker-ng package: https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/packages/pfblocke... You can also so geo-based IP blocking Combined with pfsense's recursive resolved (unbound), it makes for a pretty great home dns setup.

this is not for the faint-hearted!

Pi-hole is to pfBlocker as a Raspberry Pi is to a custom-built router

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#87

Post by jamiek88 »

rsync wrote: post #77
zeroflow wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a workaround by enabling NAT and forcing all traffic to piHole / pfblockerNG https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/recipes/dns-redir...

How does this help with DoH? If the dns request is over 443 and the DoH server is the same host as the served resource, what can be done ?

Could you MITM and inspect for dns request packets?

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#88

Post by asix66 »

0daystock wrote: post #2

Won't be long now until IoT and other crap-ware devices catch on to this trend and start hard-coding DNS servers in code, or worse, using DNS encryption to avoid this sort of routine blocking by end-users. I wonder how people are thinking about solving this problem.

I couple PiHole with a pfsense router. In pfsense all DNS queries are blocked except to my pihole. This thwarts an IoT device or streaming devices, etc., from bypassing pihole. Then I block known DoH servers on both pfsense and pihole---which is not perfect, since it's really a game of whack-a-mole, but better than not.

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#89

Post by asix66 »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #24
lapser wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is already happening. The likes of Google Home et al already hardcode their own servers. I noticed that no DNS requests were being made through my Pi Hole, so when I looked, it turned out their DNS servers were hardcoded. However, I'm more worried about when they start hardcoding DoH servers.

In the case of just using a PiHole, a hard-coded server would easily get around it. But if the network outright blocks random DNS requests, that only leaves DoH, which would require fixed IPs, which should be able to be detected and blocked, right? Sure, the setup becomes a bit more involved...

Actually no. By blocking 53 at your router to anything except your pihole, even a hard-coded IP like 8888 is blocked.

Re: Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

#90

Post by slickdork »

lousken wrote: post #54
kayson wrote: post #15

While the interface may not be as pretty, you can do the same thing if you're running pfsense using the pfblocker-ng package: https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/packages/pfblocke... You can also so geo-based IP blocking Combined with pfsense's recursive resolved (unbound), it makes for a pretty great home dns setup.

i am considering pfsense for my homelab setup - can you easily troubleshoot issues and whitelist addresses if you need to?

I recommend opnsense [0] over pfsense. I ran pfsense for 5 years and it is great, but there was some bad blood [1] between the two projects and the community.

[0] https://opnsense.org/

[1] https://teklager.se/en/pfsense-vs-opnsense/

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