Setting up a secondary Pi-Hole on my home network
1–10 of 75 posts
Re: Setting up a secondary Pi-Hole on my home network
#2I am also running a Pi-Hole and have wondered about what happens when/if the Pi-Hole goes down.
Is there a simple way to have a failover/fallback DNS configured rather than requiring two Pi's? On failure, I'd like my DNS to just fallback to my routers default DNS - yes I'd get ad's but I think that's acceptable.
Re: Setting up a secondary Pi-Hole on my home network
#3Recently did similar except set it up on a VPS. With IP filtering so that it’s not an open resolver. (Easy in my case given static ip)
Theory being that it’ll provide a bit more resilience than dual locals
Re: Setting up a secondary Pi-Hole on my home network
#4I am also running a Pi-Hole and have wondered about what happens when/if the Pi-Hole goes down. Is there a simple way to have a failover/fallback DNS configured rather than requiring two Pi's? On failure, I'd like my DNS to just fallback to my routers default DNS - yes I'd get ad's but I think that's acceptable.
Usually in your router/DHCP you can configure two DNS servers. Define the PiHole as the first, and whatever upstream fallback IP you want as the second.
Re: Setting up a secondary Pi-Hole on my home network
#5Recently did similar except set it up on a VPS. With IP filtering so that it’s not an open resolver. (Easy in my case given static ip) Theory being that it’ll provide a bit more resilience than dual locals
Why not use a tunnel like Wireguard so that you don't need an IP filter on the rental box side? That way if your home public IP is reassigned you don't have so much work to do. Bonus encryption for DNS traffic, too.
Re: Setting up a secondary Pi-Hole on my home network
#6I am also running a Pi-Hole and have wondered about what happens when/if the Pi-Hole goes down. Is there a simple way to have a failover/fallback DNS configured rather than requiring two Pi's? On failure, I'd like my DNS to just fallback to my routers default DNS - yes I'd get ad's but I think that's acceptable.
Usually in your router/DHCP you can configure two DNS servers. Define the PiHole as the first, and whatever upstream fallback IP you want as the second.
Note that this quite often results in round robin between the two DNS servers, not a primary and fallback as intended.
Re: Setting up a secondary Pi-Hole on my home network
#7I recently set up a Pi-Hole for the first time, but I spun it down pretty quickly. On desktop / mobile I already have client-side ad-blocking, and it's not like the Pi-Hole can block embedded ads in adware apps like YouTube on iOS, so I just couldn't really justify keeping it powered.
I suppose if you have a house full of Samsung / Huawei / etc. IoTs that you really need to keep connected to the Internet for whatever reason, I could sort of see it, but I don't and I genuinely can't figure out other use cases for it. I'm far from a networking whiz though. Am I missing something?
Re: Setting up a secondary Pi-Hole on my home network
#8I recently set up a Pi-Hole for the first time, but I spun it down pretty quickly. On desktop / mobile I already have client-side ad-blocking, and it's not like the Pi-Hole can block embedded ads in adware apps like YouTube on iOS, so I just couldn't really justify keeping it powered. I suppose if you have a house full of Samsung / Huawei / etc. IoTs that you really need to keep connected to the Internet for whatever…
I run a pair as my DNS. For me they're mostly there to block tracking over ads. Approx 10% of my DNS lookups get eaten by it using the standard ad list. Ublock / privacy badger grabs a bunch, the piholes still kill a bunch more.
Re: Setting up a secondary Pi-Hole on my home network
#9I am also running a Pi-Hole and have wondered about what happens when/if the Pi-Hole goes down. Is there a simple way to have a failover/fallback DNS configured rather than requiring two Pi's? On failure, I'd like my DNS to just fallback to my routers default DNS - yes I'd get ad's but I think that's acceptable.
Even better than failover is reliability. I fought with pi-holes for years. Now I have a pfsense firewall and I'm no longer hacking together half solutions to networking challenges or rerolling an OS on a new SD card once a year.
Re: Setting up a secondary Pi-Hole on my home network
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Usually in your router/DHCP you can configure two DNS servers. Define the PiHole as the first, and whatever upstream fallback IP you want as the second.
Note that this quite often results in round robin between the two DNS servers, not a primary and fallback as intended.
There are two ways a home router can control your DNS:
A) Each client has one DNS server: the router's local IP address. The router runs dnsmasq or whatever to proxy the DNS requests.
B) Each client has one or more DNS servers, with the router's IP address not listed, or listed last.
If you set up B, I think most operating systems will usually use the servers in order, i.e. only fall back to the second (ISP) server if the primary (pi-hole) doesn't respond.