Having two main servers hosting Pi-Home works great - until both of them are offline for any random reason.
So I added a third Pi-Hole following Techno Tims easy to follow guide.
By using keepalived and VIP I can update, restart and tinker with the two servers as much as I want.
https://youtu.be/hPfk0qd4xEY
Setting up a secondary Pi-Hole on my home network
11–20 of 75 posts
Re: Setting up a secondary Pi-Hole on my home network
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
Nice. I'm using method B, but I cannot remember if I added a second IP or not. I'll need to try this when nobody else is at home.
Re: Setting up a secondary Pi-Hole on my home network
#13Having two main servers hosting Pi-Home works great - until both of them are offline for any random reason. So I added a third Pi-Hole following Techno Tims easy to follow guide. By using keepalived and VIP I can update, restart and tinker with the two servers as much as I want. https://youtu.be/hPfk0qd4xEY
But what if all three go offline for any random reason? Are you planning to add a fourth?
Re: Setting up a secondary Pi-Hole on my home network
#14I 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…
There's a lot of advertising activity that ublock doesn't catch, but Pi-Hole does. Usually it's tracking APIs rather than ads themselves.
It's also useful for clients where I can't install client-side adblocking, ie smart TVs (which try to phone home a _ton_ of advertising/analytics information). I also don't use client-side adblock on my work laptop (can't install unapproved extensions) nor my iPhone, so Pi-Hole still lets me browse ad-free on those.
Re: Setting up a secondary Pi-Hole on my home network
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
At least on macOS I found that if:
DNS Server 1 = Pi-Hole
DNS Server 2 = ISP DNS Service, OpenDNS, your router whatever
when pi-hole blocks the ad's DNS query, macOS will treat that as a DNS failure and use DNS Server 2 as a fallback. Resulting in the ad being shown.
Doing (A) was my first attempt and at least using a Ubiquiti router, if Pi-hole blocked a DNS query it would always fallback to the secondary DNS server. In my environment, the only way I was able to get pi-hole to work consistently was to set the pi-hole server as the only DNS server in the DHCP server.
Re: Setting up a secondary Pi-Hole on my home network
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
FWIW I had to undo B) just yesterday. I thought the same thing about resolving records in order but it does not. I didn’t dive too far in, but my proxy server would occasionally query my router instead of the pihole for DNS requests. Maybe I just did it wrong :)
For the record I was assigning these DNS server IPs via docker compose. So perhaps that makes a difference.
Re: Setting up a secondary Pi-Hole on my home network
#17Having two main servers hosting Pi-Home works great - until both of them are offline for any random reason. So I added a third Pi-Hole following Techno Tims easy to follow guide. By using keepalived and VIP I can update, restart and tinker with the two servers as much as I want. https://youtu.be/hPfk0qd4xEY
But what if all three go offline for any random reason? Are you planning to add a fourth?
It’s pi holes all the way down.
Re: Setting up a secondary Pi-Hole on my home network
#18This line/'service'; Really?! Why?
Finally, since 32GB is a relatively small disk, I installed a daily cron job to clean the apt cache[0]:
Here you go, no package required:
# printf 'apt-get clean\n\n' > /etc/cron.daily/daily-apt-clean && chmod +x /etc/cron.daily/daily-apt-clean`
Re: Setting up a secondary Pi-Hole on my home network
#19A simpler solution: Deploy one Pi-Hole instance and then set clients to use Pi-Hole as the primary resolver and your ISP/router as the secondary. In the rare circumstance that the Pi-Hole device is down, you fallback and get the "normal" ISP DNS service.
Re: Setting up a secondary Pi-Hole on my home network
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
At least on macOS I found that if: DNS Server 1 = Pi-Hole DNS Server 2 = ISP DNS Service, OpenDNS, your router whatever when pi-hole blocks the ad's DNS query, macOS will treat that as a DNS failure and use DNS Server 2 as a fallback. Resulting in the ad being shown. Doing (A) was my first attempt and at least using a Ubiquiti router, if Pi-hole blocked a DNS query it would always fallback to the secondary DNS server…
> when pi-hole blocks the ad's DNS query, macOS will treat that as a DNS failure and use DNS Server 2 as a fallback. Resulting in the ad being shown.
My experience with OSX and Pi-Hole doesn't match your experience. There's a difference between appearing to be in a failure mode (i.e. timing out) and returning blocked (null/0.0.0.0) results.