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.

  1. 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
  2. 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.

  • bufandatlBEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    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