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Comment by mihaifm | Hacker News Reader

Pihole is just a GUI on top of dnsmasq, they're not doing anything fancy, apart maybe for the extra statistics. These are some interesting ideas for improvement, I'd also be interested in something with more flexibility, but I'm not sure if there's an alternative at the moment.

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There are still a few possibilities for how it could work— first would be running multiple instances of dnsmasq and then putting a reverse proxy in front of them that would direct the traffic based on who's asking.

Another would be switching to a purpose-built DNS resolver/cache that had this capability.

Finally, you could have per-client DNS IPs, but this would require the cooperation of the DHCP server, which is less typical on a home network where that's often a closed-source router. But a "super pi-hole" following this pattern could also potentially be the DHCP server. (Yes, raspberry pi can run OpenWRT: https://openwrt.org/toh/raspberry_pi_foundation/raspberry_pi)

> Another would be switching to a purpose-built DNS resolver/cache that had this capability.

Pi-Hole has already gone down this road with their FTLDNS package[0], so it's really a question of where they want the project to go.

[0] https://pi-hole.net/2018/02/22/coming-soon-ftldns-pi-holes-o...

Dnsmasq can be the DHCP too. I basically run a "pi-hole" like thing on a Soekris - handles four subnets and routes and other neat network magic.

It serves dead pages for CSS, JS and IMG

The pf-blockerNG package on pfSense would be the next level up. Not as pretty as pinhole, but far more capable if you are willing to stick with it. And you don't have to use pfSense as your firewall/gateway if you don't want to - pfSense will work just find with only one interface as an application appliance purely for running pf-blockerNG to use as your internal DNS server.

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