1 yr. ago • 100%

Alternative to pi-hole

I've tried multiple times to run pihole in my network. I really like it because it has nice features like

colorful statistics
IPv6 support
individual filters that can be mapped to the different source IP ranges
adblocks of course

There are two things that really annoy me though.

I'm getting weird kind of timeouts. Sometimes huge parts of my devices become unresponsive because pihole doesn't seem to be responding. I've increased the rate of how many queries to process in a minute but that only helped partially
It doesn't come with a sync mechanism. Yeah I know there are third party solutions and I tested both, but after some time they stopped working very well.

So what I'm asking you guys is if you know a good dns cache that I can run and maybe keep in sync config-wise via Ansible. Other than that it should be able to filter ads and other custom lists of course.

Thanks in advance.

7 comments

What about going a totally different way like using NextDNS? You can use any ad blocker lists you would with a PiHole

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I run three piholes with gravity sync and have none of the problems you describe.

But pihole isn’t big magic it’s basically a dnsmasq with some management stuff around it. you could host a dnsmasq yourself and just fill the filter rules in the config file your self with ansible. The adliges are publicly available just get them with Ansible and parse them into a dnsmasq config template.

Here is an blog about it. https://alblue.bandlem.com/2020/05/using-dnsmasq.html

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I run a pihole stack with unbound for a recursive dns cache and stubby for dns over tls. I am looking into a dnsmasq server in between pihole and unbound that will update local dns with labels from my docker-compose files. That would complete me.

Unbound really speeds up dns requests

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I run two pi-holes with gravity-sync between them and have done for ages. Never had an issue.

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Been running PiHole now for at least 5 years without issue. Sounds like you have something else going on.

It's just dnsmasq at the core, which has been around for ages.

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https://github.com/0xERR0R/blocky

It’s what I use

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AdGuardHome

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