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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

#71

Post by zeroflow »

lousken wrote: post #54
kayson wrote: post #15

While the interface may not be as pretty, you can do the same thing if you're running pfsense using the pfblocker-ng package: https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/packages/pfblocke... You can also so geo-based IP blocking Combined with pfsense's recursive resolved (unbound), it makes for a pretty great home dns setup.

i am considering pfsense for my homelab setup - can you easily troubleshoot issues and whitelist addresses if you need to?

Yeah. You have a live logging tab and can either put the URL into a whitelist rule by clicking on the plus icon or manually input it into a whitelist setting.

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

#72

Post by dmead »

vorpalhex wrote: post #66
asdkhadsj wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of cost is associated with pihole, with respect mostly to very latency sensitive things like competitive gaming. Is it problematic?

I run two piholes, rackmounted and battery backed (just plugged into a ups). DNS performance is very fast, better than ISP dns usually. General web usage is much, much more pleasant. No issues with gaming.

there will be issues if you play halo. it depends on some telemetry stuff in windows that is typically blocked by this sort of thing.

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

#73

Post by zeroflow »

0daystock wrote: post #2

Won't be long now until IoT and other crap-ware devices catch on to this trend and start hard-coding DNS servers in code, or worse, using DNS encryption to avoid this sort of routine blocking by end-users. I wonder how people are thinking about solving this problem.

There is a workaround by enabling NAT and forcing all traffic to piHole / pfblockerNG

https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/recipes/dns-redir...

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

#74

Post by BrandoElFollito »

asdkhadsj wrote: post #57
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...

What sort of cost is associated with pihole, with respect mostly to very latency sensitive things like competitive gaming. Is it problematic?

You will not have any extra latency once the DNS resolution is done.

The resolution has to be done a way or another, by default this is your ISP and they usually suck. I had hand-picked DNSes before (there is a utility that tests plenty of them from your connection) and after adding a pihole on a simple RPi it was even faster.

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

#75

Post by eyluo »

mFixman wrote: post #69
prometheus1909 wrote: post #35

I keep seeing posts about Pi Holes and it looks good, but I have previously dealt with ads by appending their delivering sites to my /etc/hosts, i.e. 0.0.0.0 trashsite1.com 0.0.0.0 trashsite2.com The only downside I see is that my approach is not network-wide. Any other reasons I should reconsider?

Similarly, why is PiHole better than using a browser ad-blocker?

My understanding is that PiHole stops the ads from being downloaded in the first place, hence the increased network performance.

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

#76

Post by BrandoElFollito »

jrmg wrote: post #18

Like any other project I run everything in a Docker container, and this project should be no different. What is the advantage of this in this case?

I do discaster recovery tests for my home lab from time to time. This is bare metal recovery (from empty hardware).

- I download the ISO for my system (Arch Linux)

- I install it on a drive

- I install docker and a (very) few other things

- I recover /etc/docker and data from a backup

- I run my docker-compose

- the server is up

Time: around 30 min to 1 hour without any documentation.

For me - THAT is the real power of docker.

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

#77

Post by rsync »

zeroflow wrote: post #73
0daystock wrote: post #2

Won't be long now until IoT and other crap-ware devices catch on to this trend and start hard-coding DNS servers in code, or worse, using DNS encryption to avoid this sort of routine blocking by end-users. I wonder how people are thinking about solving this problem.

There is a workaround by enabling NAT and forcing all traffic to piHole / pfblockerNG https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/recipes/dns-redir...

How does this help with DoH?

If the dns request is over 443 and the DoH server is the same host as the served resource, what can be done ?

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

#78

Post by [deleted] »

more_corn wrote: post #60
asdkhadsj wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of cost is associated with pihole, with respect mostly to very latency sensitive things like competitive gaming. Is it problematic?

No expected impact. If for some insane reason a game is also calling as servers your performance will be improved. Consider the case of a web page. The content you want (the news article) consists of say 100 get requests totaling 1mb. The content you don’t want (ads) consists of 120 get requests totaling 1.2mb. When pihole is in use the content you want does not have to contend with adversarial content. You have half…

[deleted]

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

#79

Post by rsync »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #24
lapser wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is already happening. The likes of Google Home et al already hardcode their own servers. I noticed that no DNS requests were being made through my Pi Hole, so when I looked, it turned out their DNS servers were hardcoded. However, I'm more worried about when they start hardcoding DoH servers.

In the case of just using a PiHole, a hard-coded server would easily get around it. But if the network outright blocks random DNS requests, that only leaves DoH, which would require fixed IPs, which should be able to be detected and blocked, right? Sure, the setup becomes a bit more involved...

Remember- there is no reason you can’t serve DoH from the www host (the web server).

So you won’t necessarily even get to play this cat and mouse game - the dns requests are indistinguishable from your web requests.

I guess you could mitm your own ssl traffic and strip out dns answers there?

But then … how soon until we see DoHoH?

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

#80

Post by rsync »

gruez wrote: post #14
phillipseamore wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already translate all port 53 traffic to my local resolver and block known DoH addresses.

If they're really evil, they'd proxy all traffic through a single host (eg. d2v3i0u0qtn52v.cloudfront.net), so you have to choose between no IOT features, or getting subjected to all the ads/telemetry.

No - as I’ve said upthread, the real evil is running DoH on the www host.

Now what ?

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