It's slightly more complicated. What you are suggesting works if (1) you are using Pi-hole as a DHCP server or (2) all your devices are individually configured to use the Pi-hole IP address for DNS resolution. What's more likely though is that you just point your router's DNS setting to Pi-hole, and in that case there is only one client on the Pi-hole dashboard - your router.
It works for me and I don't use Pi-Hole as a DHCP server or have any of my devices individually configured. I have my router acting as a DHCP server and have it tell clients to use my Pi-hole for DNS. Some routers' default firmwares don't let you do this, but most OpenWRT and Tomato and the like should.
I haven't tried Pi-Hole yet but is there a package for OpenWrt which could offer functionalities equivalent to Pi-Hole?
I already run OpenWrt on x86 hardware so I have plenty of RAM and disk.
Ha! I bought a Pi5 as a Christmas present for myself, I've only done some basic setup and gotten sidetracked by other projects - but setting up pi-hole is near the top of my list of sh*t to get done
It's suuuper easy to setup pihole on it. Takes literally 1 curl request and then like 3 minutes.
Pi-hole is such a great tool. I've been running it for a few years on a raspberry pi zero, and am constantly astonished by the sheer amount of cruft it blocks for me. Congratulations to the team for the release - happy to support you via Patreon!
I have had many times click an article link on reddit where everyone in the post comments complains about how the site is riddled with ads that it makes it unreadable and all I see is the article with a lot of whitespace.
However you can't use it on the phone while not at home (aside from using vpn/wireguard), but nextdns allows it. As for the latency - is it really noticeable?
dns latency is the single biggest reason people think their internet is slow imho
I'm not sure how that could be. Even if it's your first ever request to the host, the latency is a one time thing and then it's cached. Even an extra 100ms for DNS latency is going to be unnoticeable compared to an empty browser cache and having to download a bunch of images
I went from PiHole -> AdGuard -> NextDNS. My patience for tinkering and maintaining wasn't high enough to not just pay someone else to do it :)
Same except skipping AdGuard. Having the DNS live on a pi sounded like fun for me but it gave me stress due to power outages. There is safety in knowing you aren't adding a point of failure that only you know how to solve. I also had issues with adding backup DNS, since a backup DNS would be queried if the pihole blocked the DNS query -- so I would have to maintain two seperate blocklists, one local and one offsite.
But you don’t have to run pi-hole on a pi. I run it in an Ubuntu Linux container on my Proxmox server.
> This seems like I have to manually configure each device? You don't have to (and I assume most users don't), but you can if you want per-device reporting. You just set your router's DHCP server to hand out NextDNS's DNS servers.
That’s a good point, assuming your router allows you to do that. ATT apparently removed overriding the DNS for IPv4 and IPv6. I had to double check because I thought I could do IPv4 but no. There’s supposedly several options around it to use your own router but it’s not really worth setting up and my speed is slower using a second router.
The routers provided by your ISP are almost always budget crap. Use your own router if you care about your network
Thanks for giving my glib comment the credibility it didn't deserve.
Less flippantly, I'm worried it will be sooner rather than later that someone figures out how to route the telemetry and ads over the same TLS endpoint as the bona fide services. At that point it's game over, and I don't think it needs much "sophistication". Just a different path on the same HTTPS endpoint...
I don't trust Iran, North Korea, or China either. It's not hard, I'm an American and it's 2025. These are our adversaries (I didn't choose them) who currently commit cybercrimes against us. Hopefully in 2035 that won't be the case and we can all sing kumbaya.
I hope that you at some point will understand that these are minorities among a huge population that you are talking about. It sounds like you think that every butcher, barber, dancer, teacher, software dev etc in China is just thinking of how they can hack the US. Guess what: that's the image propagated by propaganda and very far from the actual truth. If you don't trust people, study their code and make a formed op…
This seems like woefully naive virtue-signaling to me. I geo-block all traffic from Iran, N Korea, China and Russia specifically at my clients' firewalls because I have watched the logs and could clearly see IPs from each of these countries attempt connections to American businesses every minute of every day. Try to single out the offending IP and tomorrow it moves to another; you will spend the rest of your days adding to that block list. It is perfectly sensible to block the country entirely; and better yet - as I've made a standard for my clients - block the entire world, and only allow specific countries to talk to your firewall. Then you can add more granular blocks on top of this. If something gets blocked that shouldn't, that's not painful to adjust. I have no doubt there are many fine people in Russia, but that doesn't mean there's a single computer in Russia that has any business talking to mine.
I have had many times click an article link on reddit where everyone in the post comments complains about how the site is riddled with ads that it makes it unreadable and all I see is the article with a lot of whitespace.
Can’t you just use uBlock for this?
Pihole catches a lot of the trackers and crap coming out of my android tv. On my pc I see it as an extra line of defense after ublock.
I set up pi-hole recently after hearing about it for years. I was kind of surprised at a lack of really basic features (imo): There isn't any kind of "dry run" or "phantom" mode, where requests are not actually blocked, but appear marked in the log UI as "would be blocked". This is super important because I want to see all the things my home network is doing that would be blocked before I actually hit the big red but…
I think I'll never buy a smart TV what an ultimate ahole move to put ads in there. It's like the Kindles where you have to read these ads before you can open your book (of course you can pay a 1-time fee). Like buying a movie on YouTube and having to watch ads in it or can't see full res unless you're on an allowed device. If UBO actually stops working on Chrome I'll either leave or use pihole. My cheap android phone…
My thought is to develop a headless, Smart TV like device that just sends random bullshit data to the servers that collect it.