DefederateLemmyMl

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  • 1 Post
  • 190 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: August 8th, 2023
  • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nltoTechnology@lemmy.world•The Beauty Of Having A Pi-hole · Den DelimarskyEnglish
    1·
    9 days ago

    Yeah no ublock origin really won’t block all that many

    Meh, it’s fairly easy to check this you know. If I turn off uBlock, my pihole logs do turn red. If it’s left on, pihole logs stay mostly green, with nothing suspicious or out of the ordinary getting through.

    the chattiest DNS comes from apps and smart devices, windows and mac laptops etc.

    I don’t have many of those. My work laptop is windows but it connects through a VPN only, and I have my smartphone that I barely use at home.

  • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nltoTechnology@lemmy.world•The Beauty Of Having A Pi-hole · Den DelimarskyEnglish
    81·
    9 days ago

    Your understanding is not correct. For page elements, uBlock prevents the domain from even trying to load, so no DNS request is ever made. Only if you go directly to an ad domain from the url bar (who does that?), does a DNS request get made.

    For example, on my own webserver, I created a simple static html file with an <img> tag pointing to an ad domain that I know is blocked on uBlock as well as on the pihole. Like so:

    <html>
adblock test
<img src="https://track.adtrue.com/some/bannerad.png"></img>
</html>

    Loading that page, uBlock showed 1 blocked ad on that page, pihole only logged a DNS request to my webserver, not to track.adtrue.com.

    Once I turned off uBlock in the browser and reloaded the page, pihole did log the request to track.adtrue.com and blocked it. My browser showed a broken image.

  • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nltoTechnology@lemmy.world•The Beauty Of Having A Pi-hole · Den DelimarskyEnglish
    1·
    9 days ago

    The box I’m running pihole on hosts several other services as well, so I dread having to reinstall everything. Most of it is dockerized, but still.

    Anyway, I also waffled back and forth on dockerizing pihole when I initially installed it … but ended up going bare metal, and now I wish I would have gone docker from the start. The initial install is perhaps slightly more complicated, but it’s so much more maintainable and transportable to other devices: transfer volumes, and run your docker-compose.yml on the other box … and voila, you’ve cloned your pihole. I use that system to keep my backup pihole in sync by the way.

    Before pihole was essentially a frontend for dnsmasq but it seems like it’s a bit more than that now

    Indeed, it doesn’t run dnsmasq separately anymore, but somehow incorporates all dnsmasq capabilities and it still uses dnsmasq syntax config files, and can be configured to include the /etc/dnsmasq.d configs.

  • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nltoTechnology@lemmy.world•The Beauty Of Having A Pi-hole · Den DelimarskyEnglish
    10·
    9 days ago

    Secondary DNS is not for redundancy!

    The way secondary DNS works is that a client distributes DNS requests across the primary and secondary DNS servers. So if you have pihole as your primary DNS and, say, 8.8.8.8 as your secondary DNS, you’re sending half of your DNS requests to google unfiltered. And if your pihole DNS goes down, half of your DNS queries time out.

    The way to have redundancy with DNS is with a standby server that takes over the IP of the primary server if it goes down. You can do this with keepalived.

  • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nltoTechnology@lemmy.world•The Beauty Of Having A Pi-hole · Den DelimarskyEnglish
    4·
    9 days ago

    Literally just had my pihole hard crash this weekend due to a bad update to FTL. Apparently they had a major version upgrade and didn’t bother to read the notes so I had to do a full OS reinstall.

    The v6 upgrade was such a disaster. I was bitten by it too, it started the upgrade then halfway through decided it didn’t like my OS (debian-testing) and crapped out … leaving me with a b0rked installation. Luckily I was able to return to v5 using my system backup. It was a right pain to figure out how to restore though, because they write files all over /opt, /etc, /usr/bin, /usr/local and /var.

    For this reason I have since dockerized my pihole installation. Not only does this allow you to choose the exact pihole version you want (a bare metal install only supports the latest version), but it allows you to centralize your configuration files neatly under a docker volume, so you only have to backup the volume.

  • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nltoTechnology@lemmy.world•The Beauty Of Having A Pi-hole · Den DelimarskyEnglish
    21·
    9 days ago

    Raspberry Pies (is that how you pluralize it?), and especially their SD cards are not the most reliable pieces of hardware. I’ve already had a few die on me.

    As for how annoying outages are, I guess that depends on how many people and services you have on your network relying on a functioning DNS. I am running two pihole instances on separate hardware in a keepalived virtual IP setup, with a replicated configuration. Sounds complicated, but it’s really easy.

    It’s just nice to be able to reboot or perform maintenance on my pihole knowing it won’t impact DNS, and not having to worry about interrupting my girlfriend streaming her Netflix series or whatever. For example, just a couple of weeks ago I converted my bare-metal pihole installation to a dockerized one, which was a couple of hours of work, without any DNS downtime at all.

  • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nltoTechnology@lemmy.world•The Beauty Of Having A Pi-hole · Den DelimarskyEnglish
    301·
    9 days ago

    It isn’t so much about the payload of the DNS requests, but about the content that would have been loaded if the DNS request hadn’t been blocked.

    If you load a page that has 100kB of useful information, but 1MB of banner ads and trackers … you’ve blocked a lot more than 66%. But if you block 1MB of banner ads on a page that hosts a 200MB video, you’ve blocked a lot less.

    Also a 66% blocked percentage seems very high. I have installed pihole on 2 networks, and I’m seeing 1.7% on my own network, but I do run uBlock on almost everything which catches most stuff before it reaches the pihole, and 25% on the other network.