I have an asus router with a pi-hole on the network.
I was doing some work on my server and noticed that when pi-hole was down, I couldn’t access the internet. I was looking for some ideas online how to deal with this, but they said to have a second pihole on the network in case one is offline. Is that the only way to do it? Is there any way to have the network go back to normal if the pihole is offline?
Add another DNS server (1.1.1.1, for instance) to your DHCP options. Your DHCP clients will use 1.1.1.1 when the pi-hole isn’t responsive.
Yeah this is the next best option, but a secondary pihole is the best, so you still get the dns blocking while the first one is down.
You listed cloudflare now (1.1.1.1) but I prefer https://www.quad9.net/ for the privacy and security.
The ONLY DNS server you should have set on your network is a/the PiHole(s).
Does it really do that? I thought if pi-hole blocks it, it just says nothing here, normally a pc then looks up your secondary dns and then ads are back at it.
This was my experience when i did that.
Yes, your experience will be different if your DNS is being provided by another kind of DNS resolver. If you want a consistent pi-hole experience (and you can’t avoid downtime of your current pi-hole), add another pi-hole to your network and let that be your secondary DNS resolver.
The ONLY DNS server you should have set on your network is a/the PiHole(s).
I don’t think this accomplishes what he wants. The router DHCP will assign the second DNS address as you mention, but the devices will select one at random, not as a backup/failover. So what happens is that devices sometimes go through the Pi-hole and sometimes go through the secondary DNS address and receive ads. The only real way I’m aware of is to have a second pi-hole for redundancy. Personally, I decided to use a cloud based service (NextDNS) for this exact reason. I didn’t want my families internet to rely on devices that I host.
I think it depends. In my limited experience, because I have not tested this thoroughly, most systems pick the first DNS adresses and only send requests to the second if first doesn’t respond.
This has lead at least a couple of times to extremely long timeouts making me think the system is unresponsive, especially with things like kerberos ssh login and such.
I personally set up my DHCP to provide pihole as primary, and my off site IPA master as secondary (so I still have internal split brain DNS working in case the entire VM host goes down).
Now I kinda want to test if that offsite DNS gets any requests in normal use. Maybe would explain some ad leaks on twitch.tv (likely twitch just using the same hosts for video and ads, but who knows).
Edit: If that is indeed the case, I’m not looking forward to maintaining another pihole offsite. Ehhh.
The ONLY DNS server you should have set on your network is a/the PiHole(s).
How many queries a month do you have? I’m at 15 days and I’m already at 750K. Do you pay for your service? I can do that, just curious what is common.
I’m at 30k blocked per day, over 100k queries per day.
This on a small 2 user network, with a handful of machines, but a fucking Samsung TV. That goddamn thing constantly pings all sorts of shit.
If I really restrict it (breaking some stuff on the TV), I can get to 35% of queries blocked per day, mostly from it.
Though nominal blocking kills the ads on the menu system, pretty well, making it much more responsive.
Umm, yea, if your DNS server is offline, how do your machines know how to resolve DNS names to IP addresses?
Which is why IP config has the capability for multiple DNS servers.
If this is surprising, you may wanna read up on your networking.
Use something like AdGuard or NextDNS as your secondary resolver
Check out the comment by @AtariDump@lemmy.world
The ONLY DNS server you should have set on your network is a/the PiHole(s).
Damn, fuck Windows. Fortunately I don’t have to use it.
The ONLY DNS server you should have set on your network is a/the PiHole(s).
That’s exactly what I do, since I never had any stability issues with my Pihole.
Primary and secondary dns is not a thing. There is no priority for DNS. Depending on the device it will use ether address and will only try the other on failure.
Windows calls them ‘preferred’ and ‘alternate’ DNS servers. That roughly translates to primary/secondary.
I have my pi-hole setup as the upstream DNS in my router, with cloudflare as a secondary DNS. That way, all my devices always use the router for DNS (since that’s what is advertised in my DHCP) and the router then uses pi-hole if it’s available, or cloudflare if it isn’t. But the individual device doesn’t get to choose between different servers.
The ONLY DNS server you should have set on your network is a/the PiHole(s).
The vast majority of devices that allow setting multiple DNS servers do not strictly prioritise one over the other even if they label it as primary and secondary.
That’s why I don’t let every device decide individually. I know my router (FritzBox) prioritizes the pi-hole (it’s even called “preferred” and “alternative” DNS-Server in the UI)
