Pi-hole v6

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 button. I want to fix up the allow/denylist before going live.

It's also not possible (or not clear) how to have different behavior for different clients. For my "smart tv" which I begrudgingly have to allow on my network occasionally for software updates, I want to treat it with the strictest possible list. But for my phone, I don't want that same list. There's a concept of "groups" so perhaps this is user error on my part, but the UI does not make this clear.

I don't think you know what irony means.

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?

I think log-don't-enforce and per-client block profiles are probably basic to people who work with networking regularly, but are probably pretty far out of reach for the average home user who are probably needing to expand their networking knowledge just to distribute custom DNS via DHCP.

So, I agree that those would be lovely features but are, I think, a ways beyond what I would assume the p90 of pihole users would need or be able to use.

I’ve been happy with AdGuard Home on two Pi4s and a little home server for years now: https://adguard.com/en/adguard-home/overview.html

I have some scripts to sync config between them and a Jenkins job if I want to pause blocking on them for a bit.

It looks like https://github.com/mattwebbio/orbital-sync and https://github.com/lovelaze/nebula-sync can sync configs with Pi-hole 6 now, but it’s quite a bit of code for what looks like just a few HTTP requests to get the config from one using the teleporter feature, then restore it on the others using the same.