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Comment by samgranieri | Hacker News Reader

I'm enjoying running a pi-hole on my local network that also has unbound running on it for resolving dns queries. Works like a charm, and it's nice and quick.

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I also use Pi-hole[1] and unbound[2]. You can even use tailscale[3] as a quick and easy way to use Pi-hole on all other networks through a WireGuard VPN tunnel.

[1]: https://pi-hole.net

[2]: https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns/unbound/

[3]: https://tailscale.com/kb/1114/pi-hole/

Tailscale gives me some irrational sense of happiness because it *just works* and lets you do cool things like this without having to worry (too much) about security.

Running Pi-hole on the original Pi (1) model B for over a year and really happy with it. The original Pi running Raspbian has been very reliable and working tirelessly, the only problem is the I/O bottleneck - performance querying SQLite database is unbearable.

Last Nov I spent half day installing Pi-hole on spare Pi 2 and Pi 3 (Ubuntu LTS) serving as two internal DNS Servers for home network), router (AsusWrt-Merlin) as its upstream doing DoT (DNS over HTTPS). Really happy with the performance and cost (quite, low power consumption, no heating issue, no dust collection issue, etc.)

I'm surprised application devs haven't done this, but you can "backup" a sqlite db to an in-memory sqlite db, then just "backup" the in-memory db every so often in the background.

The problem with running Pi-hole on the Pi 1 (original) is that it does not have enough physical memory after installing pi-hole stack (I used Nginx + php-fpm for the web UI), otherwise there is way to use utils like `vmtouch` to read the sqlite database file and keep it in page cache, even "lock" it.

On Pi 2 and 3 it's no longer an issue (even if you don't do anything about it) to a memory buff and better I/O (using faster micro SD).

Pi-hole provides a mechanism to backup and rotate the database from time to time, one can do that whatever way suits their use cases.

Does Pi-Hole also work with other SQL databases? If yes, you could host PostgreSQL on another Pi (or something beefier). Or maybe there is an adapter library that makes it possible to access another SQLite database via the network (not talking about NFS, as SQLite developers discourage from that).

Pi-hole is awesome. It did give me some issues with a few streaming services that I think used google ads.

Yeah, it borked paramount plus and I think hbo max on my apple tv. I just exempted that device and it's fine.

Why'd I exempt my apple tv from the pi-hole? I don't want to screw things up when my wife or visitors are watching tv :)

> Why'd I exempt my apple tv from the pi-hole? I don't want to screw things up when my wife or visitors are watching tv :)

Very wise. There are a lot of cool things I’d like to setup, but keeping things simple for guests and spouses matters.

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