this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
47 points (98.0% liked)

Selfhosted

40183 readers
498 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] -2 points 9 months ago (10 children)

If you're router has a failover DNS option, usually listed as DNS 2, I would set something like quad 9 as your backup DNS. Address is 9.9.9.9.

If you don't want to do that, then having a second instance of pihole running as the secondary DNS is pretty much your only good option

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (9 children)

That's not how the two entries for DNS works. Devices will use both rather randomly, and therefore some requests will not be filtered.

The best way is to run two instances for redundancy.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 9 months ago (6 children)

Yeah, looks like you don't know what you're talking about.

The second ipv4 DNS address is for redundancy and every network connected system will use the first one as long as it responds.

It's perfectly fine to have a single pihole and use something like quad9 as a failover in the unlikely event that your pihole goes down unexpectedly.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Run two and check the logs. You'll see about 20% of your requests will log on the second instance. So currently, that's 20% of your DNS requests not being filtered.

You'll also find some devices just latch on the the second and never use the first - again, in your scenario, these are not being filtered.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I can back this up with experience.

I'm actively running two piholes for years now. About 2/3rds of my traffic does go to the primary and some seem to 'lock on' to using just one, but most devices will swap between the two at their leisure.

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (6 replies)
load more comments (6 replies)