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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

#211

Post by 8fingerlouie »

ferminaut wrote: post #29

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...

Be aware that UI is planning to consolidate the UDM/UDM Pro software (1.x) into the UDM Pro SE / UDW software branch (2.x) in the near future, and the 2.x software doesn't use Podman and instead runs the software "bare metal".

IIRC the udm-utilities also work on the UDM Pro SE, though i'd be a lot more worried about "messing up" when it's not confined to a docker container.

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

#213

Post by dx034 »

Vladimof wrote: post #182
ctur wrote: post #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.

> ctur - 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. The overhead is very minuscule.. I always forget that I'm using it...

NextDNS allows automatically whitelisting affiliate links. That's not as easy in Pihole, making it annoying to use at times.

But otherwise I concur, I've run pihole for years without any manual intervention needed.

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

#214

Post by Root_Denied »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #188

Pi-Hole is brilliant. I set up[1] one few years back and used for over a year. Here are the issues; - When I'm away from home and traveling, if something goes wrong, the Pi-Hole is usually the single source of that error, and is hard to solve by talking to my wife to walkthrough the settings. - A few websites (India in my case), mostly government ones, do not work when Ads are blocked. Try paying LIC Premium or even…

I also ran into the issue of a wife who didn't like the fact that I had set up a pihole, apparently it blocked a number of shopping websites she was regularly looking at.

At the end of the day I looked at a few of the sites with her and whitelisted a couple of them, but basically told her that (based on the lists I was using) if the pihole was blocking the site entirely then it was either straight spam marketing or the site itself was malicious in some way.

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

#215

Post by krageon »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #199
ghostpepper wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love if there was an open 4K HDR TV but I think only a very niche audience actually cares about this so most manufacturers will not see a market opportunity

I see your point. Real question: In today's world, what is the difference between a TV and a computer monitor + RasPi? I guess the biggest issue will be streaming on services with very strict operating system / browser requirements. For example, can you stream Netflix @ 4K via RasPi? I assume no, due to super strict DRM. It is a little bit surprising to me that the big streaming companies have not creating an open so…

Size. You cannot get the quality and size of a TV in a monitor form factor.

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

#217

Post by ignoramous »

cgriswald wrote: post #127
ignoramous wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Unless I understand incorrectly, this doesn't seem to make the problem any worse. You'd just have to block the proxy rather than the DNS server. Like DoH, only a problem if that's also the web server.

You're correct but you are viewing the comment out of context. GP said: "I guess you could mitm your own ssl traffic and strip out dns answers there?"

ODoH isn't going to be defeated by TLS MitM afaik.

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

#218

Post by teekert »

I run the combo Wireguard/Adguard, what is nice is that only the Wireguard clients have the DNS filter and the rest of the network is not affected. Also I have the filter when away from home. And another advantage to setting Adguard as DNS server in the router is that the clients are split in the analytics overview (otherwise it looks like there is only one client, the router and you can't set different filters for different clients).

I do still have issues with keeping Wireguard running when I switch from lan to wan with my phone, so for now I'm setting it as conditional (only Wireguard on when outside of lan).

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

#219

Post by Roelven »

I've been running a pi-hole on my home network for years and I love it, it consistently blocks about 19% of outgoing requests. Some of the benefits for us are:

  - It disables (and hides) the annoying ads on our Samsung smart TV
  - Browsing is noticeably smoother (especially recipe websites on mobile!)
  - Most front-end browser trackers are blocked
  - It's now possible to see how often apps or devices tend to phone home by just logging into the Pihole web interface
  - We're not giving (most of) our DNS activity to our ISP
  - Updating to a newer version is a breeze with docker
Some thoughts for folks considering getting one (or more):

  - I've not locked it down further with a firewall yet to force all DNS requests to go through the Pihole, but I'm planning to. 
  - I won't run a Pihole container on my UDM as it will likely mess with future updates and settings, keeping things separate feels better.
  - Sometimes I consider adding more blocklists but every time I do, something gets annoying somewhere and I usually end up reverting to the standard config.
My pet peeve has become to report login flows or frontend interactions that break when the tracking script fails to load because of my Pihole. It doesn't happen often luckily :-).

(edit, formatting)

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

#220

Post by dustincoates »

ctur wrote: post #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.

I generally like NextDNS, but the customer service is _literally_ non-existent. About a week after becoming a paying member, I had an issue where requests wouldn't resolve at all, and there was no way to move forward, and there was no way to get help from the NextDNS team. So, a good service, but not so great for your family members who can't track down solutions to issues like that themselves.
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