So I’ve been a pihole user for a long long time…but seeing the advancements in AdGuard Home and some of the nicer UI facets, I was interested in giving it a try. I also have an active directory domain that I need to manage as well.
So, prior to recently, I had routed all DNS requests thought the AD DCs, and their upstream resolver was PiHole, and then Pihole routed to its internal install of cloudflared with DNS over HTTPS to the cloudflare DNS services.
More recently, I changed my DNS services in DNS to point directly to pihole, managed my local dns records in pihole and then used conditional forwarding to my AD DCs for local DNS resolution. The biggest benefit I saw in this adjustment is that I can identify what hosts are making what requests.
More recently than that, I brought Adguard Home into the environment and am using it as a secondary DNS server. I ended up taking it out of the mix for the moment. My thought process was having one DNS server on each of my active VM hosts just in case…but managing internal DNS records in adguard home is a bit of a pain in the ass, and there is no way to import in bulk.
So, the questions, 1) do you just use one or the other… pihole, vs adguard home… 2) do you use multiple dns servers or just a single one upstream…3) whats your preferred method of internal dns management in conjunction w/ pihole/adguard home?
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I use nextdns as I can use that when mobile but if you want a local solution adguard home has DOH/DOT built in and a nicer interface than pihole IMHO
Clients -> dnsmasq -> PiHole -> Unbound
I use Unbound as a DNS resolver and pfBlockerNG for ad blocking. My firewall blocks external DNS, DoH, & DoT servers except for
dns.adguard-dns.com, which I use on my phone.Clients>Bind>pihole>unbound
CoreDNS as my central DNS manager in my home(lab).
Currently two nodes are running CoreDNS with the same config for resilence. I really hate long DNS chains, because if something breaks in between, DNS is out … wife and children scream … me unhappy.
Current setup with five zones:
- .fritz.box - resolved to the provider-supplied router which also manages my network printer
- .home - forwarded to my UDM which runs DHCP in my home
- .lab.home - zone file which define s a wildcard to resolve all requests to my Traefik reverse proxy
- .consul - forwarded to Consul service catalog for service discovery
- . - everything else (internet) is either forwarded to AdGuard Home (and then to Cloudflare DNS) if the AdGuard service is running. If not, forward directly to the UDM. Nomad + Consul are amazing for this kind of templating and dynamic re-configuration.
Works quite well for me :-)
I was using two instances of Pihole, one on a Pi and one via WSL on my Win10 host. Unfortunately my Win10 host no longer works, it’s randomly stopped and I haven’t had the time to try and fix it. I’ve got backups of the config luckily, but to be honest if I can do a more friendly local install with Adguard I’m probably going to give that a go on windows instead. Never tried it but I’m willing to give it a shot if it means it’s not going to break. My Pi install has been bulletproof so far and kept my network running whilst my Windows install has been broken.
I use two Technitium DNS servers, the primary server runs in a container under Proxmox and the secondary as a failover on a Pi4. I only use Pihole for a handful of clients (mobile phone, FireTV etc.) these are assigned the DNS address from PiHole via DHCP, all other devices use the Technitium DNS directly. As internal domains I use the scheme “host.in.lan” and all devices (except servers) get their IP via DHCP (the Technitium DNS server also has this built in) and a DNS entry is automatically created for them via DDNS
2 instances of Adguard Home (VM and Raspberry PI with adguard sync) using DOH upstream servers (currently Cloudflare, Quad 9, and Mullvad). Works like a champ, have not touched it in over a year.
Came here to recommend AdGuard Sync. 👌
If you have active directory why not just use it’s DNS server?
I’ve been using PiHole for years but just switched to NextDNS. Mainly because I use DNS to filter adult sites for my kids. NextDNS works regardless of the network they are on. I used to block YouTube etc at night but if we’re are on holiday they get no filter.
I switched to AD Guard (at home) now as I can configure DNS over TLS for devices that only support regular DNS. So for example my kids TV talks to AD Guard and then AD Guard looks at the MAC address and sends it down a specific DNS over TLS address. So that TV gets the filters of my kids NextDNS profile.
I use technitium as the primary server, with a pair of backup servers running bind9.
The backup servers do zone-transfers from the primary.
for my home network, i use adguard in combination with my opnsense for dns.upstreams, if it needs to leave my network, are the usual suspects: google, cloudflare, and quad9 - selected based on performance
for my servers/domains i used to just be a regular BIND user, editing the zonefiles manually when needed… but i have since switched my dns over to cloudflare because “easy and no maintenance”
(i might be one of the weird ducks in this sub: i still do my mailserver myself, but outsourced my dns to cloudflare…)
though, to be honest, there are quite a few additional reasons i did the cloudflare move:
- the use of their cdn
- hiding the actual server IPs
- using their zero trust
I run 2 pihole containers on my k8s cluster. They serve up DNS to the rest of my network. This is extremely easy as I can just use helm to launch the pihole containers into two different namespaces using 2 different site specific files. Then I use teleport to keep them in sync when I change something, which is seldom. I run 2 because DNS is important and I like automated patching / reboots. This requires I have redundant services.
Clients --> Windows Server 2022 DNS --> Pihole --> Internet
I have two piholes setup as full recursive dns servers (unbound) DHCP is handled by TP link Omada and the piholes are the two dns servers. The top of the DNS chain is cloudflare 1.1.1.1