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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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Noob question about PiHole (feddit.it)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hy everyone, I have a PiHole instance running on my home server, and I changed my router (Fritz box) DNS in order to use my PiHole. Everything runs great.

I was wondering if I can put another DNS provider on my "alternative DNS server" in my router, in order to have a fallback alternative in case my server is down, or if I should avoid it.

I'm asking this because I don't know if the request will be handled in parallel between the two DNS provider (that would make my PiHole useless) or not. Thank you.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

There's no RFC that specifies that a specific order is applied to DNS servers.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (2 children)

RFC 2182 details the operation and functionality of secondary DNS servers. Which defines/influences how resolvers behave with multiple DNS servers.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

When it comes to a “secondary”DNS... there is nothing like a primary and secondary DNS server. These indications are quite misleading but many systems adopted it this way. Pihole only list the DNS servers as primary and secondary, because this is what the providers write on their pages. The bad phrasing is supported especially by how Windows handles it.

Most operating systems implement DNS servers as alternatives, not as fallbacks, i.e. they will query any of both servers from time to time, so it is quite likely that you will loose your Pi-hole filtering capabilities (at least partially) [if you specify a secondary DNS server on your network].

The ONLY DNS server you should have set on your network is a/the PiHole(s).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

A number of problems in DNS operations today are attributable to poor choices of secondary servers for DNS zones

That RFC is about DNS servers in the context of DNS zones in domain names. Not for a DNS client running DNS queries like an operating system. And the RFC is very clear about this:

The distinction between primary and secondary servers is relevant only to the servers for the zone concerned, to the rest of the DNS there are simply multiple servers.

For your Windows, Linux whatever machine "there are simply multiple DNS servers".

Which defines/influences how resolvers behave with multiple DNS servers.

It doesn't. As I said in another comment "most operating systems will just load balance or opportunistically pick between the two", and there's the relevant part from the RFC:

All are treated equally at first instance, even by the parent server that delegates the zone. Resolvers often measure the performance of the various servers, choose the "best", for some definition of best, and prefer that one for most queries.