Setting up Pi-hole

Psycho Sonny said:
any updates to your lists?
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I came across this site with a number of recommendations, although i haven't yet tested them.

https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/upd...he-pi-hole-alternative-dns-servers-2019/13620

Which leads me on to my question, obviously the more blacklists/domains blocked the more memory that pi-hole will consume.

I'm running my pi-hole on my original raspi (256Mb memory), and i'm curious how many blacklists/domains i can add before memory consumption starts to be an issue.

Anyone added too many to the blacklist that has consumed too much memory?
 
Semple said:
I came across this site with a number of recommendations, although i haven't yet tested them.

https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/upd...he-pi-hole-alternative-dns-servers-2019/13620

Which leads me on to my question, obviously the more blacklists/domains blocked the more memory that pi-hole will consume.

I'm running my pi-hole on my original raspi (256Mb memory), and i'm curious how many blacklists/domains i can add before memory consumption starts to be an issue.

Anyone added too many to the blacklist that has consumed too much memory?
Click to expand...
I run on an original RPi B I have to unplug it once a week for 10 mins then start it up again or it will crash out. (No detail in any logs as to why just becomes unresponsive) no sure if it pihole or Lighttpd that's crashing could be either tbh.
 
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BigBoy said:
I run on an original RPi B I gave to unplug it once a week for 10 mins then start it up again or it will crash out. (No detail in any logs as to why just becomes unresponsive) no sure if it pihole or Lighttpd that's crashing.cpuks be either tbh.
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What sort of memory usage are you seeing?
 
Semple said:
I came across this site with a number of recommendations, although i haven't yet tested them.

https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/upd...he-pi-hole-alternative-dns-servers-2019/13620

Which leads me on to my question, obviously the more blacklists/domains blocked the more memory that pi-hole will consume.

I'm running my pi-hole on my original raspi (256Mb memory), and i'm curious how many blacklists/domains i can add before memory consumption starts to be an issue.

Anyone added too many to the blacklist that has consumed too much memory?
Click to expand...

Got a 4gb pi 4 so I can add away.

Seeing a 34% block rate with the list I quoted above currently
 
I tried Pi-hole before briefly but had some issues and didn't have time to resolve them so ditched it, now I'd like to try again.

I have the Pi that I ran it on last time, unless there's a better way.

My set up at the moment consists of,

Virgin modem is modem only mode
pfSense router
Ubiquiti switch and access points
Dell server running Windows Server 2016 - currently with a lot of issues, waiting for a friend to attempt a repair.

My friend helped me with the server and pfsense, but he is very busy with work and life etc.

Should I go with the Pi again or is there something else more suitable with my setup?
 
Nick1881 said:
I tried Pi-hole before briefly but had some issues and didn't have time to resolve them so ditched it, now I'd like to try again.

I have the Pi that I ran it on last time, unless there's a better way.

My set up at the moment consists of,

Virgin modem is modem only mode
pfSense router
Ubiquiti switch and access points
Dell server running Windows Server 2016 - currently with a lot of issues, waiting for a friend to attempt a repair.

My friend helped me with the server and pfsense, but he is very busy with work and life etc.

Should I go with the Pi again or is there something else more suitable with my setup?
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PfSense has a very powerful ad blocker that you can bolt on, pfBlockerNG. Adding a Pi-Hole just seems another thing to have plugged in and be running.
 
Nick1881 said:
My DHCP and DNS are currently handled by the server.
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I use a similar setup, I host pihole on an ubuntu server 16.0.4 LTS Hyper-V VM with 256MB ram assigned. Set DNS to forward to the pihole IP on your server and set DHCP on your server, to give out the your servers IP as the only DNS server on your network (so all DNS requests go through the server then onto the pihole - no split DNS).

The downside is that you don't get a breakdown of individual machines within the pihole web interface, however it works well on a domain network whilst still having server side DHCP/DNS.
 
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Had a nightmare loading a load of blocklists. It confirmed it had updated, but then every site was failing to resolve, refreshed the GUI and could see the FTL process had fallen over.

Removed all blocklists that i had added and rebooted, but FTL was still failing to start. Manually starting the process was showing the DNS service not running, trying to manually start that seems to fail as well. Tried the pihole -r to repair the installation but that seems to hang.

Time to reflash and this time i'll load blocklists one at a time.
 
Tweaked mine to point some domains to my local lancache instance https://github.com/lancachenet/monolithic

Was as simple as creating a new dnsmasq config file and adding the relevant address e.g.

Code: 
sudo nano /etc/dnsmasq.d/90-lancache.conf

address=/epicgames-download1.akamaized.net/192.168.1.202
address=/download.epicgames.com/192.168.1.202
address=/download2.epicgames.com/192.168.1.202
address=/download3.epicgames.com/192.168.1.202
address=/download4.epicgames.com/192.168.1.202
address=/pls.patch.station.sony.com/192.168.1.202
address=/gs2.ww.prod.dl.playstation.net/192.168.1.202
address=/gs2.sonycoment.loris-e.llnwd.net/192.168.1.202

Hopefully will help my poor internet connection, with 2 PS4s and 2 PCs both updating Fortnite on a weekly basis.


Only unrelated Issue I have now is that I installed all the offered Ubuntu updates and now typing pi.hole in a browser goes to a generic lighttp landing page (pi.hole/admin works fine)
 
I went through the painstaking process of adding 1 at a time, i'm upto a million domains blocked now, but it is running stable at least.

Armageus said:
snip
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Ah that could be quite a neat idea even for those of us with fast internet connections for any sites that we visit regularly where the content doesn't change much.
 
Semple said:
Ah that could be quite a neat idea even for those of us with fast internet connections for any sites that we visit regularly where the content doesn't change much.
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Only works for http (not https), so of limited use for the more general internet.

TangoEchoAlpha said:
@Armageus That looks really neat for a household with multiple gamers :)
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I tested it briefly with PS4 last night and a 460Mb download took about 5 minutes on the first PS4, less than 2 Minutes on the second :)
(And that is running lancache in an esxi VM on a 1.3Ghz Atom based Thin Client, with an msata SSD, with pihole running in a separate VM on the same host)

Works with PS4/Xbox/Steam/Epic Games/Nintendo and a few others.

With a <25MB poor VDSL connection, and 3 kids I'll take whatever speed ups I can :D.
 
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