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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* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

mary DNS Server: Clients will first attempt to use the primary DNS server specified in their network settings. This ser

What's the point tho? If your PiHole fails you need to know otherwise you could be risking days / months of web surfing in the fallback DNS server without even noticing it.

As for a reply, there’s no RFC that specifies that a specific order is applied to DNS servers. So in short, you can't have a fallback that is reliable and most operating systems will just load balance or opportunistically pick between the two.

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

Thank you, this is what I was worrying about. As for the "why", even if my server is quite stable, a shutdown may be necessary and sometimes slowdowns with pi-hole happened. Some redundancy would have been better.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Setup two PiHoles

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Well, I'm not sure you read the other comments but there is confirmation that for clients there isn't an order for DNS servers from RFC2182:

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.

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.