Hy everyone,
I have a PiHole instance running on my home server, and I changed my router (Fritz box) DNS in order to use my PiHole. Everything runs great.
I was wondering if I can put another DNS provider on my “alternative DNS server” in my router, in order to have a fallback alternative in case my server is down, or if I should avoid it.
I’m asking this because I don’t know if the request will be handled in parallel between the two DNS provider (that would make my PiHole useless) or not.
Thank you.
I’ve set my secondary DNS to cloudflare, and my pihole still blocked ads for me. I assumed the secondary DNS server is used only if the primary can’t be pinged. But i haven’t actually looked into it.
Putting Cloudflare as my secondary would allow some requests to get through and then often the device whose requests went to Cloudflare would continue using Cloudflare for a while.
The best solution I found was to run a second Pihole and use it as the secondary.
You can use something like orbital sync to keep them syncronized
Pretty much. Not sure how the router determines which DNS to use, but mine seems to latch onto whichever one serves up results the fastest, which would inevitably be cloudflare direct after the pihole returns enough blocks.
So I use a Raspberry Pi Zero W as a dedicated pihole, and my Pi 4 seedbox acts as its own pihole and as a redundant backup. Then use gravity-sync from the Zero to the 4 to mirror the settings.
Another cool trick is using tailscale to ensure your portable devices always can access your Pihole(s) from anywhere and then setting those server’s tailscale addresses as your DNS servers in tailscale.
This way you can always use your DNS from anywhere, even on cell data or on public networks
I keep a third instance of Pihole running on a VPS and use it as the first DNS server in tailscale so it will resolve a bit faster than my local DNS servers when I’m away from home
Huh, I’ll definitely look into that. Both times I tried to route external pihole access, somehow other mystery services found it and it slowed to a crawl from getting absolutely pounded by requests not from me. Thanks for that tip!
Afaik there is no primary and secondary, you cant tell which one to use.
Its best to have 2 piholes, but having 2nd DNS set to nextdns or something like that should be fine if you cant run 2 instances, probably not the best setup tho
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I’ve set my secondary DNS to cloudflare, and my pihole still blocked ads for me. I assumed the secondary DNS server is used only if the primary can’t be pinged. But i haven’t actually looked into it.
I have two piholes, and sometimes both will receive requests at the same time, if there’s a lot of traffic.
Yeah this is what I do.
Putting Cloudflare as my secondary would allow some requests to get through and then often the device whose requests went to Cloudflare would continue using Cloudflare for a while.
The best solution I found was to run a second Pihole and use it as the secondary.
You can use something like orbital sync to keep them syncronized
Pretty much. Not sure how the router determines which DNS to use, but mine seems to latch onto whichever one serves up results the fastest, which would inevitably be cloudflare direct after the pihole returns enough blocks.
So I use a Raspberry Pi Zero W as a dedicated pihole, and my Pi 4 seedbox acts as its own pihole and as a redundant backup. Then use gravity-sync from the Zero to the 4 to mirror the settings.
Another cool trick is using tailscale to ensure your portable devices always can access your Pihole(s) from anywhere and then setting those server’s tailscale addresses as your DNS servers in tailscale.
This way you can always use your DNS from anywhere, even on cell data or on public networks
I keep a third instance of Pihole running on a VPS and use it as the first DNS server in tailscale so it will resolve a bit faster than my local DNS servers when I’m away from home
Huh, I’ll definitely look into that. Both times I tried to route external pihole access, somehow other mystery services found it and it slowed to a crawl from getting absolutely pounded by requests not from me. Thanks for that tip!
When it comes to a “secondary”DNS… there is nothing like a primary and secondary DNS server. These indications are quite misleading but many systems adopted it this way. Pihole only list the DNS servers as primary and secondary, because this is what the providers write on their pages. The bad phrasing is supported especially by how Windows handles it.
Most operating systems implement DNS servers as alternatives, not as fallbacks, i.e. they will query any of both servers from time to time, so it is quite likely that you will loose your Pi-hole filtering capabilities (at least partially) [if you specify a secondary DNS server on your network].
The ONLY DNS server you should have set on your network is a/the PiHole(s).
Thanks for the clarification. I’ll be updating my settings.
Afaik there is no primary and secondary, you cant tell which one to use. Its best to have 2 piholes, but having 2nd DNS set to nextdns or something like that should be fine if you cant run 2 instances, probably not the best setup tho