Pi-hole v6

https://pi-hole.net/blog/2025/02/18/introducing-pi-hole-v6/

by tkuraku • 1 year ago

573 304 1 year ago

Mossy9• 1 year ago

Pi-hole is such a great tool. I've been running it for a few years on a raspberry pi zero, and am constantly astonished by the sheer amount of cruft it blocks for me.

Congratulations to the team for the release - happy to support you via Patreon!

hk13374• 1 year ago

I have had many times click an article link on reddit where everyone in the post comments complains about how the site is riddled with ads that it makes it unreadable and all I see is the article with a lot of whitespace.

martin_a2• 1 year ago

IT department does not like that, but I had them install Firefox on the machines of my team, so we can install uBlock Origin. People are _amazed_ how the internet does look without ads.

ed_mercer• 1 year ago

Can’t you just use uBlock for this?

unsnap_biceps3• 1 year ago

Does anyone know if pihole is ever going to add DoH or similar support natively? I've had such troubles with cloudflared awhile back that I gave up on DoH, but would love to encrypt those queries.

zamubafoo• 1 year ago

I've been using https://github.com/DNSCrypt/doh-server for serving my DNS server via DOH for at least 2 years. Only had two issues with it and both were due to lack of maintenance on my part (ie. not updating the binary for one and then not re-configuring it after I changed configurations for the upstream DNS).

hotpocket777• 1 year ago

Assuming doh = dns over http

unsnap_biceps3• 1 year ago

Yes

chgs3• 1 year ago

I’m not sure why I’d ever want DoH, I block as much as I can at my firewall and have a canary domain.

I want my devices to use my defined dns sever on my network, not some ad company (and all tech companies eventually become ad companies)

unsnap_biceps3• 1 year ago

I want pihole to talk encrypted to the upstream dns server. I don't actually care if my devices talk encrypted to pihole.

I just don't want to leak dns requests to my isp. If there's a way to do this without DoH or DoT, I'd happily learn more about it.

unethical_ban3• 1 year ago

IIRC, there is not a native GUI method for Pihole to talk encrypted to DoH providers. You have to set up a daemon locally and configure via CLI, then set that as your "upstream" DNS provider in Pihole admin.

Obviously the goal is to have your local clients talking to Pihole, but the goal of having remote DNS queries encrypted is to prevent ISP snooping.

Though if you really want to prevent ISP snooping you have all clients using VPN or configure your router to send all outbound traffic to a VPN endpoint.

ndriscoll• 1 year ago

Speaking of not wanting DoH to exist on the local network, does anyone know if there is anything pre-existing that can hook into firewall rules to default deny outgoing traffic and only allow (until TTL expiry) in response to a DNS lookup? That way things cannot bypass your DNS filtering with DoH or hardcoded IPs.

kube-system3• 1 year ago

People use DoH/DoT so that their upstream DNS lookups are not transmitted in plaintext across the open internet. You can do this and still run your own DNS server on your network. The parent commenter is asking about Pihole with DoH, which is exactly this.

newman314• 1 year ago

You can insert dnscrypt-proxy inline between PiHole and an upstream server. So it'll work something like the following:

Client --DNS--> pinhole --DNS--> dnscrypt-proxy (localhost) --DoH--> upstream

Not the prettiest but it works.

eamag• 1 year ago

Want to highlight https://nextdns.io/ as a similar service, very happy with it

poisonborz• 1 year ago

Pihole being a self-hosted service and this being a third party one, I would say the target group is somewhat different.

whalesalad3• 1 year ago

it's more than that - an app running on your internal network is going to have way better latency than nextdns

system7rocks2• 1 year ago

Same for me.

I had Adguard running on a Pi 2 I think and it died. Couldn’t access my network remotely. Learned my lesson and switched to NextDNS on a bit more solid device.

leca• 1 year ago

NextDNS is SASS, you can't self-host it.

zymhan2• 1 year ago

Pi-hole isn't a "service" though. It's just FOSS.

hk13374• 1 year ago

This actually seems rather nice. Not the same as PiHole but I can see its upsides.

One upside I like about PiHole is that I can set it up to distribute the DNS to all my devices. This seems like I have to manually configure each device?

ATT doesn't let you set the IPv6 DNS, so I either have to disable IPv6 on the network or setup PiHole to pass IPv6 and the DNS I want to the device.

CharlesW2• 1 year ago

This seems like I have to manually configure each device?

You don't have to (and I assume most users don't), but you can if you want per-device reporting. You just set your router's DHCP server to hand out NextDNS's DNS servers.

shmoogy• 1 year ago

If only they had a stop blocking function.

CharlesW2• 1 year ago

FWIW, in my years of using NextDNS I think I've needed to do this only twice. On Macs, the menubar app lets you enable/disable NextDNS. The average HN reader can probably automate switching to a non-blocking profile for a given length of time. https://community.home-assistant.io/t/nextdns-integration-te...

AnonC• 1 year ago

NextDNS has not updated its client applications on multiple platforms (iOS/iPadOS/macOS) for several years. Those client applications did have the ability to stop the blocking (or not), but now it's just a toggle that does nothing.

Most of the time when I visit test.nextdns.io it shows as "unconfigured" even though the NextDNS client is installed and configured with a NextDNS profile (and approved in Settings as a VPN provider on these OSes). Sometimes it will work on its own.

I wouldn't recommend NextDNS unless the user is comfortable installing a (somewhat) permanent Profile on these devices with no temporary "off" switch to stop blocking. For me it's important to stop the blocking once in a while.

At least on macOS, there's Little Snitch (paid application), which can subscribe to the same blocklists used by ad blockers and has a working toggle.

LeoPanthera5• 1 year ago

I've been using AdGuard Home, which does pretty much the same thing, but is slightly better polished, with things like support for DoH and OSs other than Linux.

https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome

lawn2• 1 year ago

I even run Adguard Home on my router that runs opnsense.

samplatt2• 1 year ago

What routers are compatible with opnsense? Or does it need a full-blown server/container?

Been happy with my pihole for a few years, and this thread is full of new information for me.

roger_• 1 year ago

I moved to AGH a while ago too.

Is there anything in Pi-Hole v6 that would make someone switch back?

laweijfmvo• 1 year ago

I went from PiHole -> AdGuard -> NextDNS. My patience for tinkering and maintaining wasn't high enough to not just pay someone else to do it :)

vosper• 1 year ago

Yeah +1 for NextDNS. It's so easy to setup and manage, and works really well.

LeoPanthera5• 1 year ago

The big benefit of running a DNS server locally is caching. Using any external provider means you have to go out to the internet for every single request.

With a local server, most requests are fulfilled from the local cache.

mrmuagi2• 1 year ago

Same except skipping AdGuard.

Having the DNS live on a pi sounded like fun for me but it gave me stress due to power outages. There is safety in knowing you aren't adding a point of failure that only you know how to solve.

I also had issues with adding backup DNS, since a backup DNS would be queried if the pihole blocked the DNS query -- so I would have to maintain two seperate blocklists, one local and one offsite.

sph3• 1 year ago

I used to use NextDNS, but pi-hole is such low maintenance it makes no sense to pay for a third party service and additional latency to do ads filtering. I set up pi-hole on an Arch Linux for ARM installation on a rPI 3 like 5 years ago and haven't touched it since. Still chugging along nicely.

2OEH8eoCRo03• 1 year ago

I love AdGuard Home but the single binary container from a Russian company makes me nervous. I may move to building it myself. Is this criticism unfair?

skotobaza5• 1 year ago

Is this criticism unfair?

Only if you don't trust only Russians and no one else.

LeoPanthera5• 1 year ago

Given that the whole thing is open source and it is possible to build it yourself, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Not that it means all that much, but AdGuard is headquartered in Cyprus, for what it's worth.

sunaookami• 1 year ago

Is this criticism unfair?

Yes because you judge people by the country they live in. AdGuard has made their stance clear if something like this is important to you: https://www.reddit.com/r/Adguard/comments/t15gr4/announcemen... & https://adguard.com/en/blog/official-response-to-setapp.html

seemaze2• 1 year ago

I built it myself for a while but as I mentioned elsewhere, it's now being packaged in the Alpine Linux testing branch. That makes a container image an 'apk add' away.. whether you trust Alpine Linux more or less than the AdGuard Home teams is up to you.

brynx97• 1 year ago

DoH is possible on pihole using cloudflared-- https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns/cloudflared/.

The cloudflared binary will also work with other DoH providers.

nocchedure• 1 year ago

Pet peeve: I wish there was an (easy) way of installing Adguard directly on my Dream Machine.

zzyzxd• 1 year ago

And it's much easier to customize.

- I run it in Kubernetes with multiple replicas behind a load balancer for high availability.

- A companion iOS shortcut for family members to temporarily pause protection on all replicas for online shopping.

- Configuration as code, which gets mounted as a secret.

- Query logs from all replicas forwarded to loki for visualization and performance review.

mattrighetti• 1 year ago

Switched to AGH too a few years ago because from time to time pi-hole would get stuck upon unplanned reboots of the Raspberry Pis on which I had it installed

febrianrendak• 1 year ago

I don't know why but adguard often just freeze and need to be restarted. Maybe due my device is old enough (Pi 1). But Pihole + cloudflared run flawlessly.

bangaladore3• 1 year ago

Ironically their website has been hugged to death.

piyuv• 1 year ago

Why is it ironic? They’re not providing load balancing or anything similar

bangaladore3• 1 year ago

Sorry if the point wasn't clear.

The service/device dedicated to killing connections (blocking dns, whatever) can't/won't serve my connection.

NeckBeardPrince• 1 year ago

I don't think you know what irony means.

bangaladore3• 1 year ago

Maybe you'd better define it as an "amusing twist".

triyambakam• 1 year ago

At this point we should accept the vernacular use of the word as correct.

zymhan2• 1 year ago

The web interface has been completely overhauled with settings split into Basic and Expert modes. This allows users to customize their experience based on their comfort level and needs.

This sounds helpful for setting up a Pi-Hole for family or friends that aren't DNS admins by day.

_fat_santa• 1 year ago

Pi-hole is a killer application and I've loved it since I got it setup. One other app I highly recommend to run on your Pi in addition to Pi-hole is Nginx Proxy Manager[1].

[1] https://nginxproxymanager.com/

yard2010• 1 year ago

Nginx Proxy Manager is a great piece of software!

aborsy• 1 year ago

How do? It has frequent vulnerabilities.

robk• 1 year ago

Do yourself a favor and move from nginx to caddy

jrace• 1 year ago

I run nginx, what is better about caddy?

kmfrk• 1 year ago

Lots of great memories using Pi-hole and messing with RPi. I eventually ended up putting my devices on Tailscale and managing DNS through it, eventually using Mullvad VPN as the exit node.

Pretty good interface, and most people just have to connect using the app. Having a virtual network between devices with dedicated IPs is pretty nice too.

andy_xor_andrew• 1 year ago

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.

jkingsman• 1 year ago

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.

bdcp• 1 year ago

For the seconds question, it is indeed Groups. I have my SO's phone bypass everything. It's the way she wants it.

Yea i agree it's not super UX friendly.

ge962• 1 year ago

I think I'll never buy a smart TV what an ultimate ahole move to put ads in there. It's like the Kindles where you have to read these ads before you can open your book (of course you can pay a 1-time fee). Like buying a movie on YouTube and having to watch ads in it or can't see full res unless you're on an allowed device. If UBO actually stops working on Chrome I'll either leave or use pihole.

My cheap android phone installs games by itself eg. candy crush ugh. My own fault I get it buy a $2K phone instead of $160

b3lvedere6• 1 year ago

Most non-smart 4K screens are more expensive than 4k-smart tv screens though. Really weird, because there's less stuff in it. I just want a nice 50" 4k screen with hdmi and display ports. I don't use all the other junk anyway, since i watch tv via a computer and sounds goes to a surround set.

lotharcable22• 1 year ago

I have a 'smart tv'. I don't allow it to connect to any network.

The only really annoying thing about it is that noises from tv shows or the house sometimes triggers the voice recognition, which fails, and then you have to click through the error message.

reddit_clone• 1 year ago

I am hanging on to my 15 year old Vizio for dear life (With a Roku box). We don't watch much TV anyways. Its just Youtube playing.

I dread the day it dies.

JKCalhoun• 1 year ago

My thought is to develop a headless, Smart TV like device that just sends random bullshit data to the servers that collect it.

oz3d• 1 year ago

does pi-hole actually block youtube ads ? last time I tried it did not really work (on pc and phone). Switched back to UBO

They probably do some tricks that blocking ads with DNS is not possible.

themadturk• 1 year ago

I just have never connected my Samsung TV to the Internet. My streaming all goes through my Roku. When the TV turns on it displays a splash screen asking me to connect to the network, which disappears after about 15 seconds and never comes back until I turn the TV back on.

I know there are TVs far more obnoxious than this, but I have no complaints and the Internet doesn't know a thing about my TV.

AstralSerenity• 1 year ago

If you use an Android device, you have the potential to live an ad-free life:

- Use Firefox with Ublock Origin and BypassPaywallsClean to avoid ads and Paywalls. - Use ReVanced to patch your YouTube APK to disable ads, add SponsorBlock to avoid in-video ads, etc. ReVanced can also patch all major social media apps to remove all ads. - Use OSS apps to avoid ads or get extra functionality. I use OuterTune for free music, Aliucord/Revenge for a better Discord client, etc.

josephg• 1 year ago

For my "smart tv" which I begrudgingly have to allow on my network occasionally for software updates

Why install software updates if you don’t use the “smart” features? Our smart tv has been banned from the internet for years.

timoteostewart• 1 year ago

I imagine software updates might bring improved support for various media codecs, or UI enhancements, or better Bluetooth compatibility, etc.

hsbauauvhabzb2• 1 year ago

My tv after a recent update has begun randomly crashing with audio looping for a few seconds before rebooting. When an update comes through for that you can he damned sure I’ll be disabling all future updates.

psychlops• 1 year ago

Same, my smart tv has never heard of the Internet.

nkrisc• 1 year ago

The way I handled this issue for my family and devices is just by having two SSIDs - one with pihole blocking and one without. If it’s interfering with something me or my wife can just switch to the unblocked network temporarily.

MyOutfitIsVague2• 1 year ago

It's also not possible (or not clear) how to have different behavior for different clients

There's a menu item for that: Clients. You create a group, add a client to that group, and configure blocking for that group. To have what you want, you create a group that has just one client in it.

paxys• 1 year ago

It's slightly more complicated. What you are suggesting works if (1) you are using Pi-hole as a DHCP server or (2) all your devices are individually configured to use the Pi-hole IP address for DNS resolution. What's more likely though is that you just point your router's DNS setting to Pi-hole, and in that case there is only one client on the Pi-hole dashboard - your router.

aulin• 1 year ago

I use pihole for dhcp and it's extremely easy with dnsmasq. Hope their settings overhaul does not break this.

dhcp-option=tag:nospam,option:dns-server,x.x.x.x dhcp-option=tag:spam,option:dns-server,y.y.y.y dhcp-host=client1...,set:nospam dhcp-host=client2...,set:spam

everdrive• 1 year ago

You can definitely set client groups, either based on CIDR, MAC (if on the same network segment) or individual IP. From there, you can assign different domains and list to the specific groups.

BHSPitMonkey• 1 year ago

Is a DNS blackhole the right way to restrict your TV from doing bad things? The software running on the device might not even use DNS lookups to connect to hosts as it pleases. Your router is probably the better place to add guardrails.

progbits3• 1 year ago

I recommend putting all these things on their own VLANs with strict routing rules.

For example my STB is on a VLAN that has WAN access (otherwise it won't do anything), but that makes it untrustworthy so it is completely isolated from rest of LAN.

On the other hand some "smart"/IoT devices are on a VLAN that has no WAN access so that they can't phone home, become a botnet, or download firmware updates that remove functionality in favor of subscription services. Only a VM running homeassistant can talk to them.

This will work until amazon sidewalk / built-in LTE modems become too frequent, at that point I'll have to start ripping out the radio modules from things I buy.

xrisk3• 1 year ago

It’s a start for sure, a TV that’s really out to track you might well be able to circumvent these blocks, but most TVs (and indeed most tracking technologies on the web) to my understanding are not so sophisticated. For the average person who wants to enjoy some of the smart features of their TV this is a good compromise.

And I’m not sure what you mean by the router being the better place to add guardrails. What sort of guardrails can you possibly add outside of blocking internet access outright to the TV? It would be near impossible to distinguish between legitimate traffic and ad/tracking traffic without resorting to something like SNI sniffing which again can be bypassed.

temp0826• 1 year ago

Smart/iot devices using DoH (or other encrypted DNS) is a headache that would need to be solved at the router (mitming/redirecting to your preferred provider? or straight up blocking) with a big blocklist. Unfortunate what a double-edged sword DoH is becoming.

guhcampos• 1 year ago

I think [1] is quite irrelevant to be honest. Blocking DNS isn't a destructive operation. I've been using pi-hole for years and I simply block everything and cherry-pick a few exceptions here and there when something breaks. I only had to really troubleshoot maybe 3-4 times in years, and half of that were related to the fact I worked for companies that had domains blocked.

hotstickyballs• 1 year ago

It's destructive if you can't reach your remote devices anymore. See also jeff geerling's "It was DNS T-Shirt" https://www.redshirtjeff.com/shop/p/it-was-dns-shirt

btreecat• 1 year ago

There's also adguard home

https://adguard.com/en/adguard-home/overview.html

zikduruqe• 1 year ago

It replaced my Pi-hole a long time ago.

NoPicklez• 1 year ago

You'd be hard pressed to find that an auditing mode would be helpful. Even once you hit that big red button, depending on the blocklists you use you will come across false positives that cause issues.

Mekoloto• 1 year ago

You need to put your SmartTV on a different VLan.

The biggest risk is not samsung knowing what someone watched but what devices you have on your lan

windexh8er• 1 year ago

One of the most values I get out of a SaaS service is NextDNS [0]. There are competitors like ControlD [1] that are also very good. At the end of the day they both check all the boxes for me.

But, the piece that really got me with NextDNS when I started using it was the unlimited number of profiles. This allows me to target any device, no matter where it is (this is fantastic for mobile devices) and keep my filtering lists in place. I selfhost a lot but still find the annual cost of NextDNS more than fair.

[0] https://nextdns.io/ [1] https://controld.com/

simooooo• 1 year ago

Adguard home seems to be better in every way. Not sure if this is a feature though.

kayson• 1 year ago

I wish pfblocker-ng was as easy to use and polished as pihole. It seems silly to run an extra DNS resolver if I'm already running one on pfsense, but the interface makes it tempting

jedisct1• 1 year ago

I just use dnscrypt-proxy directly.

seanp2k2• 1 year ago

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.

seemaze2• 1 year ago

A Raspberry Pi with Alpine Linux makes a sweet little DNS server. AdGuard Home is even packaged in the testing branch[0] these days

[0] https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=adguardhome&arch=

plg• 1 year ago

love pi-hole

we block all meta and X properties from our home network, also ads

and it's self hosted on our own metal

it's a wonderful life

andrewinardeer• 1 year ago

we block all meta and X properties from our home network, also ads

There's a difference between meta, X and ads?

google234123• 1 year ago

Good way to teach other members of your house to use VPNs to bypass your censorship regime

sciencerobot• 1 year ago

meta and X are both heavily censored so I guess it's censors all the way down?

Fnoord2• 1 year ago

I also block Twitter ASN (yes, it is called Twitter ASN), and a whole bunch of IP ranges from not so democratic countries with very bad hostile actors. They don't have rule of law there, so I don't need these.

With regards to X. Blocking it serves as a good reminder to use a proxy, or try and find the source elsewhere (Blue Sky, Mastodon). More often than not, these exist.

Finally, if required I can use Tor Browser. No cookies, no profiling, no ads.

jccalhoun• 1 year ago

I've been using Technitium for a couple years and been pretty happy with it https://technitium.com/dns/

bjoli2• 1 year ago

So have I. I found it more approachable once I started having more advanced configurations.

malmeloo• 1 year ago

Technitium is great. Rock solid, plenty performant and it has more features than you'll ever need. Pretty wild when you consider it's being maintained by a single dev.

JamesBrooks• 1 year ago

I moved from pihole to Technitium a few months back because I wanted more DNS features than just adding A and CNAME records.

For example the split horizon features to return different responses to DNS queries depending if I'm connected to my Tailscale network or not has been pretty slick.

I documented that process here in case anyone is interested: https://blog.jamesbrooks.net/posts/technitium-dns-server-wit...

tailspin20194• 1 year ago

Excellent write-up. As a Tailscale + Pi-hole user you may have just inspired me to switch to Technitium. I’ve wanted that kind of split horizon functionality for years, for all sorts of things!

2bluesc• 1 year ago

Switched to Technitium (from piHole via Docker on amd64 and manual dnsmasq before that) primarily for DNS over HTTPS and never looked back. Used it for DHCP and DNS.

ConanRus• 1 year ago

We’ve integrated a new REST API and embedded web server directly into the pihole-FTL binary. This eliminates the need for lighttpd and PHP"

oh noes!

ncrmro• 1 year ago

Nice.

I wish pihole or adguard would add support for change DNS records based on the query subnet. I believe this is called DNS views.

That way my local devices and wireguard devices can get the correct IP for internal services.

VTimofeenko• 1 year ago

In unbound those are indeed views[1]. I moved from pihole to unbound+nsd a couple of years ago for precisely this use case. Block filters courtesy of[2].

[1] https://unbound.docs.nlnetlabs.nl/en/latest/topics/filtering...

[2] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

Marsymars• 1 year ago

I managed this by getting a gTLD (digit-only .xyz is cheapest) for internal-only services and then running a Caddy instance to reverse-proxy to my internal services. I don't port forward or open ports to that Caddy instance, so it's not available externally.

dpacmittal• 1 year ago

With ddwrt and adguard, it took a while to setup but I can ping all my devices with <hostname>.lan.

unethical_ban3• 1 year ago

Slightly off topic, but it annoys me that protonvpn does not allow split tunnel of DNS to an internal host. It calls this DNS leak protection, which is a good default. But I want to run my own DNS server and I know what I'm doing, and the Proton GUI won't let me.

aspenmayer• 1 year ago

The GUI app should have a custom DNS option:

https://protonvpn.com/support/custom-dns

unethical_ban3• 1 year ago

I am almost certain that in my previous testing, internal DNS addresses still didn't work. Their "leak protection" blocks it.

miningape• 1 year ago

Ha! I bought a Pi5 as a Christmas present for myself, I've only done some basic setup and gotten sidetracked by other projects - but setting up pi-hole is near the top of my list of sh*t to get done

edm0nd• 1 year ago

It's suuuper easy to setup pihole on it. Takes literally 1 curl request and then like 3 minutes.

RandomDistort2• 1 year ago

Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I've got a semi-obscure DNS question.

I'd like to use Cloudflare's Zero Trust DNS filtering with DoH by running a DNS proxy on my network.

I can get this to work great with github.com/adguardTeam/dnsproxy (running on a Pi 4B) but what I would really like is to have different devices (based on their IP on the network) get their queries forwarded onto a different DoH upstream.

Is this possible in a simple way?

woleium2• 1 year ago

Perplexity thinks so:

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/i-d-like-to-use-cloudflare-...

LeoPanthera5• 1 year ago

Please don't use AI to write your comments. If I wanted to know what AI thinks I could ask it myself. I read the comments to get feedback from humans.

Edit: OP edited their comment, was previously a very long AI-generated response.

Etheryte• 1 year ago

Please don't spam HN with LLM generated slop. The value of HN is the human discussion, everyone here is perfectly capable of asking an LLM of their choice.

wkyleg• 1 year ago

In my experience Pi hole is a very worthwhile investment. People who used my internet when I had one would remark how much faster it was. Everything in general seems faster, even things that you wouldn't think of. I typically use Brave for browsing which has good ad blocking capabilities, but this adds a whole additional layer.

The only reason I don't use one now is that I travel a lot more so it's irrelevant, and I have to work enough on tools with Google/Vercel/other analytics that it is just very inconvenient.

Regarding smart TVs, I have found that it's better to just use an Apple TV or Kodi box and never connect to them internet though. Having said, I gave my TV away because I never used it, so this might not be as up to date. A Pi hole will block ads on smart TVs though.

_chris_• 1 year ago

Wouldn’t a smart tv do something ... smarter than just using the default dns given to it by the network?

I’m not up to speed on this stuff but I thought pihole only blocked the simplest stuff from devices that play nice?

dark-star• 1 year ago

Wouldn’t a smart tv do something ... smarter than just using the default dns given to it by the network?

It could certainly try... but usually you would block that in your firewall. Fixed DNS servers or fixed server IP addresses are tricky because if you ever need to change them, you can't, because you'd need to update the hardware (which you can't since it sits behind a firewall).

It could try to use things like Google's DNS server, but that is easily blocked in your router.

Not a lot that could be done except trusting your (internal) DNS server...

netsharc• 1 year ago

Why should the programmers of the TV's OS look for edge cases, and do you think the TV makers would give them budget for that? For 90+% of users the standard config of trusting the DHCP server will work fine, and the Pi-Hole users will probably not give them money anyway, and will be dedicated to defeat their workarounds...

natebc• 1 year ago

I've been worried about companies that make software like this (applications with embedded telemetry or advertisements) starting to do their on DoH style lookups.

I don't KNOW of any doing it but I can't imagine it'd be too hard for them to do.

Shadowmist• 1 year ago

I had an Apple TV connected to a TCL Roku TV and the TV was analyzing video frames from the AppleTV to popup ads suggesting to watch the same content on other streaming services.

Salgat• 1 year ago

I used to love pihole, but it seems like it's more trouble than it's worth now. Advertisers have wised up and will use the same subdomain for both content and ads. I've also had issues with normal website functionality being broken due to pihole which isn't fun for my wife. It seems mostly useful for blocking background traffic on smart devices, not so much for ads.

mrbluecoat• 1 year ago

5+ year development cycle. Impressive! https://pi-hole.net/blog/2023/10/09/pi-hole-v6-beta-testing/

Any details on what HTTPS support provides, other than a TLS connection to the admin dashboard?

thomassmith65• 1 year ago

That works for me. It means I don't need to relearn everything every year, and the major versions probably won't be riddled with bugs.

Sohcahtoa822• 1 year ago

I love PiHole.

I run my PiHole on a small cloud VM that I use for several projects, but put it behind a VPN that's configured to only forward DNS lookups, then VPN into it from my phone. So many advantages behind this setup.

- Since only DNS lookups are tunneled, I don't have to worry about tunneling ALL my traffic and paying egress fees

- Blocks ads in ALL apps, not just my browser

- If it's acting up, I can just disconnect from the VPN to disable PiHoling

- Don't have to expose my home IP address and open a port for the world to start banging on

TheArcane• 1 year ago

Don't have to expose my home IP address and open a port for the world to start banging on

Is that really an issue if all you're exposing is the VPN port? Wireguard for instance has industrial-grade encryption. Even open port 51820 should be fine

Sohcahtoa822• 1 year ago

I mean, probably not. But I like the idea of keeping everything closed anyways.

8fingerlouie4• 1 year ago

With wireguard in particular, you're probably not running much risk, as wireguard runs over UDP, and as long as you're not connecting with a correct (recognized) key, it will not even generate a response, so a potential attacker has no way of knowing for sure that wireguard is running on a given port.

lanthade• 1 year ago

The big feature miss for me in this announcement is baked in support for configuration sync between servers. Redundant DNS is common and it would be nice if pi-hole supported this oob. Making it even better would be an ability to see stats across all synced servers from one location.

reboot81• 1 year ago

I’m using https://github.com/ShiromMakkad/docker-pihole-sync To sync my two piholes. But I haven’t figured out how to keep my third pihole (ip-failover) to get in the loop…

undersuit• 1 year ago

I'm using https://github.com/vmstan/gravity-sync to sync my three piholes but I'll need to find a replacement if I upgrade to pihole v6.

TriangleEdge• 1 year ago

I have a script update my hosts file to route domains to 0.0.0.0 and ::0 . I get the domains from https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts.

precommunicator• 1 year ago

The point of pihole is setup blocking on multiple devices though, some of them which you don't control like your PC e.g. smart tvs

nirav722• 1 year ago

Still no wildcard domain support for local DNS.

Netcob2• 1 year ago

Finally a REST API!

I've been waiting for this - I wanted to play around with blocking distractions on various rules, but controlling pi-hole remotely was a huge pain and often didn't work until now.

nirav722• 1 year ago

Have they added more to the existing API? They already had an http API to enable/disable blocking.

Netcob2• 1 year ago

The admin API wasn't really official - at least I couldn't find documentation anywhere and had to piece it together from the source code. And regex filters didn't seem to work through that - didn't get an error back, but nothing changed either.

issafram• 1 year ago

FINALLY. that dev branch was out there forever

peme969• 1 year ago

noice

eellpp• 1 year ago

Have used pi hole for over 5 years and very happy with it. Most times I use it via phone to manage kids devices to block/unblock access etc and this also works quite well . Thank you very much

sizzle4• 1 year ago

Will it block YouTube ads?

107292875• 1 year ago

Short answer : no.

sizzle4• 1 year ago

What’s the long answer? Ads are obfuscated across the video stream and served as blobs?

Xerneos• 1 year ago

Long answer: also no

ProllyInfamous2• 1 year ago

I've had the same PiHole rule (for years!) which blocks all the text-splash-over-ads... but it becomes very cat and mouse if you want to block the pre-roll video ads (any rule that initial works... won't for very long).

Instead, use yout-ube.com [insert a hyphen into any URL] and ALL ads disappear.

TZVdosOWs3kZHus• 1 year ago

Came here to give a big THANK YOU to everyone making this project possible.

I am using Pi-Hole for about 8 years and can't imagine a world without it.

Another big THANK YOU to all list maintainers out there. You're doing an incredibly useful service to the community.

tailspin20194• 1 year ago

Seconded! I’ve been using it for multiple years and it is extremely good, and reliable.

There are always some features that I wish it had, but ultimately it does a really good job.

It’s easy to take for granted the hard work that goes into creating and maintaining such awesome tools.

dmacvicar• 1 year ago

I do something similar to Pi-Hole using plain dnsmasq.

I use two old PINE64 (one with FreeBSD, one NetBSD to make it more fun), and the Ansible configuration downloads https://github.com/ShadowWhisperer/BlockLists and creates a file dnsmasq can use. Which lists from the repo to use is defined as a variable.

Works very well and I feel I can understand what is going on.

opengears• 1 year ago

if you are on openwrt i can recommend checking out unbound and adblock as alternatives (running directlly on your routers without the need of a raspberry pi)

urbanporcupine• 1 year ago

I am a beginner and never used Pi-Hole before.

I checked that Pi-Hole can run on Raspberry pi zero as per the GitHub. But would you recommend to use Raspberry Pi 5 2 GB or 4 GB RAM instead of Raspberry Pi zero. I don't have any Raspberry Pi and I intend to make a new purchase.

theshrike792• 1 year ago

The 5 is completely overpowered and overpriced to run Pi-hole. Go with the zero instead.

Havoc• 1 year ago

Can it do native dns over http yet? Without hacky unbound proxy I mean.

That’s why I switched to affairs home but wouldn’t mind switching back

ProllyInfamous2• 1 year ago

I make these suggestion during all conversations about PiHoles:

Use Class A2 SDmicro cards (they'll last significantly longer... particularly if you keep logs). There are additional 3rd-party installations which can write into RAM, but IMHO it's easier for most new users to just buy better NANDs.

Set up more than one physical Raspberry Pi, running multiple versions of PiHole software on multiple IP addresses.

Have your main DHCP router auto-issue DNS information for your "most permissive" PiHole, with a minimal list of choice URL-blocks (e.g. pagead2.* , doubleclick). Individual clients can then manually change DNS server to 2nd (3rd... 4th...) PiHole(s) which are each more-restrictive.

This allows non-technical users to still browse somewhat ad-free, but also won't block banking/govt/etc for novices. As a failsafe, teach users to enter your router's IP as DNS x.x.x.1 [should they ever need to bypass local filtering, entirely].

I use sequential IP addresses [192.168.0.6, x.x.x.7, x.x.x.8, x.x.x.9] so it's easier to explain/teach my networks ad-blocking capabilities. YES, I understand that Pi-Hole allows different clients to follow different rulesets, but if you can afford to buy redundant hardware it's just so much easier to change the client DNS server information when a specific website isn't working correctly [due to erroneously blocked host].

Pi-hole v6

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