I've run Pi-hole in my homelab for years and benefited from using the service. As well as the hands-on education.
With that said, what is everyone else's experience with the software? Do you use Pi-hole in your homelab setup? I would assume many hundreds of thousands of people use Pi-hole.
Edit #1:
The image attached to this post is my RPi 5, which hosts the Pi-hole software. Big supporter of the whole "SBCs for learning and home improvement" mentality.
Edit #2:
It is interesting to see the broad support for Pi-hole and DNS blockers in general. The more options, the healthier the tech ecosystem is, which benefits everyone.
I installed a Pi-Hole largely to serve as a local DNS, but enabled the ad-blocking 'cause it seemed silly not to. My wife got very upset. Apparently she likes the ads.
With that aside though, it seems to work quite well. Just make sure to (a) use a reasonably-powered device (my Pi Zero appears to be taxed by it) and you should probably use an Ethernet connection 'cause my Pi Zero regularly flakes out so DNS requests fail due to the IP being "unreachable" for a half second.
Set static IPs for her devices, then whitelist that device IP past the block lists by adding it to a group, then regex allow domain: '*' for that group.
how does flaking out present itself?
I had an issue for a long time where the pihole seemed to be bricking the network, and combined with the Eero mesh it was a pain to bring back online each time due to order of operations restarting devices and enabling/disabling DNS on the router
Basically the IP stops responding to any traffic. At one point I set up a constant ping, and every once in a while I got something like "destination host unreachable". It doesn't happen often enough for me to move the service onto a physical device though. That's work and I'm tired like, a lot.
hmm. I wonder if that was what was happening to me
it hasn't happened since my ex moved out, so there's less traffic...
but I think it actually stopped before that.
Ahhh the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor). I created a separate vlan just for her when she comes over, and she can have all the ads and crap she wants. Just keep it off my network.
Must be to most wife thing I've ever heard :)))