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.

  • rentar42
    22•10 months ago

    The issue is that according to the spec the two DNS servers provided by DHCP are equivalent. While most clients favor the first one as the default, that’s not universally the case and when and how it switches to the secondary can vary by client (and effectively appear random). So you won’t be able to know for sure which client uses your DNS, especially after your DNS server was unreachable for a while for whatever reason. Personally I’ve “just” gotten a second Pi to run redundant copies of PiHole, but only having a single DNS server is usually fine as well.

    • @Kir@feddit.itOPEnglish
      3•10 months ago

      This answered my question. Thank you. I guess I will sacrifice redundancy

        • @dorkage@lemmy.caEnglish
          3•10 months ago

          I run multiple pinholes using keepalived. Then I only use one DNS in my DHCP server. Second pihole will seemlessly take over if the first one goes down whilst using the original DNS address.

          Work quite well. I had to learn the hard way that only using a single pihole was just asking for my partner to be mad when it didn’t work / when I was doing server maintenance. Now I have multiple and they can all seemlessly take over if any my server nodes are down