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Setting up a Pi Hole made my home network faster

brianchristner.io

101–110 of 249 posts

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

#101

I know some folks are anti Ubiquiti Unifi on here, but you can run pihole (along with a bunch of other stuff) right on a UDM/UDM-Pro. IMO it makes the most sense to run this on the router, and you can run it in a docker container. If you're looking for a fun hour or two project, check out: https://github.com/boostchicken-dev/udm-utilities/tree/maste...

For OpenWRT users, I managed to easily get it working with LXC. Sources are in "SmoothWAN" project at Github. OpenWRT natively supports LXC now. Shortcut: https://github.com/TalalMash/smoothwan-feeds/tree/main/pihol...

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

#103
post #91

I found this basically only helped for laptops. Our phones and smart devices all use either DoH or hardcode a specific DNS resolver. I haven't spent the time going all the way down to re-routing all port 53 traffic, but I doubt it'll do much. To me the future of the home network is largely dead as long as I can't reasonably manage the software on these devices.

Hardcoded devices/software is a very good point, not sure why the text is faded/downvoted.

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

#104
for those who want something effective outside of their home network...

ublock origin works fine as a plugin in firefox on android, and blocks ads just as effectively on firefox on desktop.

the ability to install arbitrarily chosen firefox compatible plugins on firefox on android is a huge deal for me. it makes it almost as powerful and useful as firefox desktop.

the only time I need to touch chrome anymore is when using some rare 1% of online shopping website that seems to think a firefox useragent is a bot.

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

#106
For those not wanting the overhead of running a service on your network, NextDNS sells what is basically managed pihole. I’ve used it for about a year and have been very happy. It also lets you use it on mobile devices for when you aren’t on your home network.

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

#107
post #79

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...

Remember- there is no reason you can’t serve DoH from the www host (the web server). So you won’t necessarily even get to play this cat and mouse game - the dns requests are indistinguishable from your web requests. I guess you could mitm your own ssl traffic and strip out dns answers there? But then … how soon until we see DoHoH?

> how soon until we see DoHoH?

DoH over Tor already exists, but more importantly, Oblivious DoH (kind of like DoHoH) is being standardized by the IETF: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-pauly-dprive-obliviou...

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

#108
post #75
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My understanding is that PiHole stops the ads from being downloaded in the first place, hence the increased network performance.

uBlock prevents then from being downloaded too

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

#109
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?

I do discaster recovery tests for my home lab from time to time. This is bare metal recovery (from empty hardware). - I download the ISO for my system (Arch Linux) - I install it on a drive - I install docker and a (very) few other things - I recover /etc/docker and data from a backup - I run my docker-compose - the server is up Time: around 30 min to 1 hour without any documentation. For me - THAT is the real power…

In short: the power of declarative configuration management. Way less error-prone than imperative shell scripts.

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

#110
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?

Specifically relating to pihole (as of previous versions) it wasn’t the cleanest install uninstall experience and left a bunch of crap behind on my system. I now run it in a docker container because of this, but I can’t speak to OPs motivations

I run everything in a Docker container because I have 50+ services running, and I don't want to spend any time on their inner workings. I truly couldn't care less. I only manage the access layers (configuration parameters, volumes, ports and reverse proxy). Using Docker every application is the same from a management perspective.
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