Setting up Pi-hole

Soldato
Joined
24 Sep 2015
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3,657
Rather than spend time trying to fix the broken Pi Hole installation I did a fresh install of Raspbian, installed Pi-Hole and put back a recent backup.

From start to finish it took less than 10 minutes including download Raspbian and having to dig out a new SD card as I managed to snap the existing one.
 
Associate
Joined
1 Dec 2010
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1,657
Location
North Wales
I leave the DHCP off, I trust my router more than a Pi for DHCP.

On my router, I set the primary WAN DNS as the IP of the Pi. Secondary DNS as 1.1.1.1. This means that any device connecting to the router will have it's external DNS from the Pi, all internal DNS goes through the router. I leave the DHCP DNS as the IP of the router.

Sometimes this can cause issues as devices don't always think of secondary how they should, sometimes they simply spread the load between them. Windows is known for doing funny things like deciding to use the secondary randomly which could bypass your pi-hole.
(Just catching up on this thread and thought id mention it.)
 
Don
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21 Oct 2002
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Parts Unknown
Sometimes this can cause issues as devices don't always think of secondary how they should, sometimes they simply spread the load between them. Windows is known for doing funny things like deciding to use the secondary randomly which could bypass your pi-hole.
(Just catching up on this thread and thought id mention it.)

No, my router dishes out it's own IP as the DNS.

Only my WAN connections go through the Pi-Hole. My router uses the Pi-Hole IP by default, if it can't find it, it fails over to 1.1.1.1.
 
Soldato
Joined
15 Aug 2010
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N. Ireland
We're moving apartments in the next couple of weeks and I was wondering what's the best way to get PiHole setup on the new network/address? Is there a file I can edit or would a fresh install be recommended?
 
Soldato
Joined
15 Feb 2003
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10,042
Location
Europe
Has anyone found a good guide for setting up Pi-Hole with DNSCrypt 2?

I've not been able to follow any of the ones I've seen as they all seemed to relate to Pi-Hole FTLDNS not the regular Pi-Hole version.

My problem is that after I comment out the google servers in /etc/pihole/setupVars.conf and /etc/dnsmasq.d/01-pihole.conf Pi-Hole just doesn't seem to use any DNS at all. This despite me setting the ip and port in /etc/dnsmasq.d/02-dnscrypt.conf (I presume that is the file Pi-Hole uses to know where to look for the DNS server and port combination)
 
Last edited:
Soldato
Joined
15 Feb 2003
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10,042
Location
Europe
Not a good start for me:

Code:
sudo pihole -up
  [i] Checking for updates...
fatal: unable to access 'https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole.git/': Could not resolve host: github.com
  [i] Pi-hole Core:    up to date
  [i] FTL:        update available

  [i] FTL out of date

  [i] FTL Checks...
  [✓] Detected ARM-hf architecture (armv7+)
  [i] Checking for existing FTL binary...
  [✗] Downloading and Installing FTL
  Error: Unable to get latest release location from GitHub
 
Associate
Joined
31 Aug 2017
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2,209
My pihole currently lives on a dietpi install on an odroid c2 clocked in at 1500 odd mhz, over the last year it has been on several things like a pi zero, pi 3 and various other pi type sbc as i seem to have a lot of them.
The c2 its on at the moment is well overpowered, especially as i am using its emmc option which is faster than a flash card - pi hole harldy touches it when running and even hitting the gui or updating the thing its loading only a couple of cores pretty low.

Its attached to the back of my vodaphone hub via a usb cable which powers it and a lan cable, no wireless in use. It doesnt currently do my dhcp (left that to the router) but of course does do dns duties.
Its going to be running as an ip cam recorder for security soon as well, thats not going to use much grunt either - plenty to spare and its not even overclocked, although there is prob 10% there if need be.

Bit messy but hey its never touched. Just noticed it needs a system update, prob do that at the weekend.

Pihole is great, everyone should have a pihole setup - speeds up browsing and makes things more secure.

 
Associate
Joined
31 Aug 2017
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2,209
I just tried to update mine, wouldnt do it lol.
typical of linux stuff with me, 95% hassel and buggering about until you finally guess what the dev actually had in mind.
 

maj

maj

Soldato
Joined
19 Jul 2010
Posts
2,584
Location
Durham
I wish there was an easier way for Pi Hole to display the network name of a device rather than its IP address. Two examples on my home network are our phones and due to the similarity in IP address it is hard for me to remember which one is which.

Seems it is possible to do but requires editing the etc/hosts file on the Pi itself. My limited linux knowledge is struggling to work out how to do it.
 

maj

maj

Soldato
Joined
19 Jul 2010
Posts
2,584
Location
Durham
@BigBoy I use DHCP unless I manually configure a static IP like I did on the two phones to change DNS to pi-hole ip. I use pi-hole just for DNS. Router handles everything else.
 
Soldato
Joined
23 Aug 2005
Posts
3,955
Location
Beds
Not a good start for me:

Code:
sudo pihole -up
  [i] Checking for updates...
fatal: unable to access 'https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole.git/': Could not resolve host: github.com
  Error: Unable to get latest release location from GitHub

I had the same error on my primary pihole, I'd forgot to set the dns in /etc/resolv.conf to the secondary pihole. So when the upgrade switched off dnsmasq on the primary it couldn't resolve DNS anymore.
 
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