Selfhosted
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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I've had pihole running in the past, then Adguard, but moved to NextDNS several years ago and have been happy with it. For a small fee, it removes all need for self hosting your own. I set up profiles for the kids, wife etc, then set the DNS in their phones, tablets, so I know its always working wherever they are. You can set local IPs in it if you want, but I use a reverse proxy for all LAN requests instead.
Only slight issue I've had with it was recently making several quick changes to DNS in Cloudflare, and NextDNS took several hours to propagate which was a PITA at the time.
Edit: I've just seen that they now offer a free tier which they didn't in the past.
And how do you fix the problem with applications that have hard coded dns?
If you're referring to network based DNS, I use their script to have it on my Ubiquiti router as well. I have that with its own profile with full blocking for iot etc.
I had PiHole with unbound on my OPNsense way back when, but the internet just needs to work for both me and my family and not go offline with me tinkering with the homelab. NextDNS takes all of that hassle out of the equation.
Thanks. How do you like your ubiquiti?
I love it. I started with pFsense, then really liked Untangle for its ease of use, then went (back) to OPNsense and preferred that for the fact it could run Caddy internally as a reverse proxy and was fast, but I was a bit frustrated at wanting to do more with it and needing to research everything. I already had Unifi APs and decided that it just made sense to have a Ubiquiti router. I've found it stable, easy to use with good feature updates, and have also just paid for the annual Cybersecure add-on which is reporting loads.
Not sure what you mean by "network based dns".
Hard-coded DNS is in the application, you cannot change this from any dhcp option. Browsers do it, lots of versions of prime video apps do it. Google nest and home devices are famous for this.
You can write a NAT rewrite rule at your router to catch any UDP or TCP request on port 53 and send it to your ad-blocking DNS server/forwarder, but you won't be able to stop DoH (DNS over https), which just leaves the subnet encrypted on 443.
I was being too simplistic in my other reply. I was referring to basic router based DNS and NextDNS as the upstream resolver.
I don't have an answer for hard coded DNS when it comes to NextDNS, which is essentially an upstream resolver with block lists functionality.
And to be honest, I misinterpreted OPs original question which was to take PiHole to the next level, whereas NextDNS is an alternative to.
I can run app based routing and blocking on my router, but whether that would restrict DNS for those services I don't know.
Thanks for the clarification, you've got me wanting to pursue more DNS control now!
That's the double-edged sword of DNS over https. It allows us to hide our DNS queries from local ISP and others, but it also allows applications to hide theirs also. It just looks like encrypted web traffic to your router.