Setting up Pi-hole

Eliot said:
IM still using a Pi-Hole and am loving it. About 70% of my outbound requests are blocked, everything is working perfectly and all over DoH
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How do you see outbound activity vs inbound?

Roughly 10% of activity is blocked from looking at my dashboard. I guess we use the web in very different ways. Still I think it is best used in conjunction with a content blocker.
 
englishpremier said:
How do you see outbound activity vs inbound?

Roughly 10% of activity is blocked from looking at my dashboard. I guess we use the web in very different ways. Still I think it is best used in conjunction with a content blocker.
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Well, I mean its all outbound isnt it, no inbound DNS.

Yeah i mean things like alexa, my tv, random **** in windows are the main culprits i'd think.
 
In the admin webpage click on tools>tail pihole.log

And it will show you all DNS requests as they happen, if you have setup static IP's it shouldn't be to hard to work out what's what.
 
englishpremier said:
I recently re-setup Pi-hole on an unused Pi. Seems things have moved on over the past 6-12 months.

I'm bringing to wonder what the point is in DNS blockers. If it's to avoid ads, google and other organisations are serving ads from the main content domain now, so your google search or youtube videos will still be littered by ads.
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obviously you will still get ads from various places but plenty still get blocked. blocking 50% is better than blocking 0%.

i have noticed a lot of sponsored links no longer work. so i have to disable the pi-hole for 5 mins now and again when i'm looking to buy something and googling the model number.
 
I have setup 2 pi-holes in amazon vps and its working fantastic. Set a primary dns as my dns1.domain.com and secondary dns as my dns2.domain.com. Both boxes are getting queries now.

EDIT: Just had a lightning strike, took out my Pi4 POE Hat! Luckily it's working over mains.
 
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I have my pihole hosted on a CentOS VM but also have it on a Pi Zero W which is now spare. I was thinking of having the Zero W as the secondary DNS in case for some reason my VM is down. How do I go about it? Due to me using my ISP router and DNS settings being locked down, I'm using pihole as my DHCP server so any device that automatically connects to my network is forced through pi-hole.
 
All you would do is spin up 2 servers and make sure port 53 is open on the external pihole. You don’t need to open port 53 on the internal one (unless you have a firewall enabled on the pihole).

You then would put your primary dns and a secondary dns IP in. You can have more if you like if the first one isn’t available it automatically switches to the second one.

I’ve tested this and it works great. I tested it on 4 servers and I downed 2 and it automatically went over to the other one.

You can set your DNS per device on the device itself but since you are using your pihole as the DHCP this should be fine. I would be looking to change your router for a bit more advanced one.

You see this is one reason my Public DNS servers would have come in handy!
 
mrbell1984 said:
All you would do is spin up 2 servers and make sure port 53 is open on the external pihole. You don’t need to open port 53 on the internal one (unless you have a firewall enabled on the pihole).

You then would put your primary dns and a secondary dns IP in. You can have more if you like if the first one isn’t available it automatically switches to the second one.

I’ve tested this and it works great. I tested it on 4 servers and I downed 2 and it automatically went over to the other one.

You can set your DNS per device on the device itself but since you are using your pihole as the DHCP this should be fine. I would be looking to change your router for a bit more advanced one.

You see this is one reason my Public DNS servers would have come in handy!
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Thanks but would you mind explaining more where I would put the primary and secondary DNS in? Apologies if I'm missing something obvious.
 
mrbell1984 said:
In Network settings.

Go to command prompt, type “ipconfig /all” and show me the output in a screenshot.

Might take 2 screenshots though or copy and paste the text and put it into a paste bin.
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Ah got you now. Thought you meant I had to put them both in either router or pihole somewhere. Would do doing it this way mean I'd have to manually specify both DNS servers on each device I wanted a primary and secondary DNS?
 
maj said:
Ah got you now. Thought you meant I had to put them both in either router or pihole somewhere. Would do doing it this way mean I'd have to manually specify both DNS servers on each device I wanted a primary and secondary DNS?
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No No, you could enter them in on the router as long as all the devices where pointing to the routers address. Then the router will serve it out up to the pihole and then whatever you set on the pihole as the upstream DNS.
 
mrbell1984 said:
No No, you could enter them in on the router as long as all the devices where pointing to the routers address. Then the router will serve it out up to the pihole and then whatever you set on the pihole as the upstream DNS.
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I might be wrong, so apologies in advance, but I think he says his the DNS settings are locked out/down on his router.

https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/secondary-dns-server-for-dhcp/1874/25 this thread has a few suggestions on how/if possible to add to the DHCP server.
 
VaderDSL said:
I might be wrong, so apologies in advance, but I think he says his the DNS settings are locked out/down on his router.

https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/secondary-dns-server-for-dhcp/1874/25 this thread has a few suggestions on how/if possible to add to the DHCP server.
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Yep you are right, says so right in the first message "Due to me using my ISP router and DNS settings being locked down".

In that case you could use the pihole as the DHCP server. Turn off the routers DHCP server and use the pihole as the DHCP server.
 
If we're on about mine then it is the Plus Net Hub 1. You can view the DNS settings but can't change them which has been confirmed by the ISP staff on their own forum.
 
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