Hacker News Reader

Comment by djhworld | Hacker News Reader

I've been running a Pi-Hole instance for about a year now, it's excellent. I could never get it to work with my router, but manually configuring the DNS on my devices to point to it works just as well.

One thing that became immediately apparent was how much faster browsing the web got after I turned it on.

View on HN

Been running it myself for 5-6 months, and other than the occasional (actually, very rare) complaint from the Mrs. that a link she clicked won't go through due to a blocked tracker/analytics intermediary, it's been a peachy time VPNing into our home network so it works just as well on the go.

Our install Pi-Hole points its upstream DNS to 1.1.1.1, with uBlock Origin where possible installed on our devices. Can't imagine going back.

What advantage is there in using 1.1.1.1 instead of your own DNS resolver?

Some ISP-provided resolvers fraudulently replace NXDOMAIN responses with NOERROR IN As pointing to (ironically, in this context) advertisment sites.

I'm aware of the problems with ISP-provided resolvers. I meant running your own resolver, like named, which queries the root zones itself, supports DNSSEC response authentication, etc.

In that case: local resolvers involve actually installing and configuring a recursive dns server, which isn't everyone's idea of fun, whereas 1.1/8.8.8.8 can be set up with a one line config file edit and then forgotten about.

To add to a1369209993's comment, an alternate DNS might be faster (as Cloudflare claims for 1.1.1.1), too. Or more stable than your default DNS. But for me, anyway, I made the switch after Frontier started pulling the NXDOMAIN stunt.

...also censorship. Even my German ISP (Vodafone) apparently reroutes some URLs to servers they control.

Solved it with DNS66.

I resorted to having that PiHole to be my DHCP server and I turned off DHCP service on the router. It's a bit more fragile, but more flexible as well...

Agreed, same for me. I did get it to work with my router as well, and it works amazingly well. When you supplement it with the community ban lists as well, it's incredibly powerful and updated quite frequently. Highly recommend it. Works great off a Raspberry-Pi.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com