I’m looking at getting a gateway device to replace the ISP router that sits between the internet connection and the mesh WiFi.
I am running pi-hole on a (very old) raspberry pi, but I know some gateways get quite fancy so I’m wondering if it’s possible to have pi-hole on the gateway itself, to run as DNS and DHCP servers?
Other things I’m looking for in a gateway are VPN as a client (preferably Wireguard) and PoE ports for cameras.
If it’s possible to host something like pi-hole directly on the gateway then hardware recommendations are appreciated!
Most of the more advanced gateways have some sort of DNS filtering built in. Opnsense has an adguard plugin, pfsense has pfblocker-ng, openwrt has a few different options, Unifi and mikrotik both have solutions too I think. Usually you can just load the same block list that pihole uses into the filtering software and you are good to go.
If you want the most flexibility and want to use the same hardware for both gateway/DNS and want to try out different DNS/router solutions a hypervisor would give you the most options. But it would also be the most complicated.
One of the things I use pi-hole for is to set customer DNS entries so anyone on the network will be redirected directly to the self hosted services when the type in the appropriate domain name. So it’s not just about the filtering (which I also want), but also the (network wide) custom DNS entries.
I’m also happy with simple. I’m not overly against keeping the pi-hole and gateway separate but was just wanting to know if combining them would be an option (which is sounds like it is, but not super easy).
Both opnsense and pfsense allow custom DNS entries so you still have that as an option. Probably the other options do too but you’ll just have to verify.
But if you want to keep it simple I would just keep the pihole as a separate device. A lot of the built in options aernt quite as easy to setup and don’t have the best UI compared to pihole IMO.
Thanks, yeah I will consider the options. Would be nice to have it in one as the raspberry pi is aging (it’s an original model B) and the gateway should be plenty powerful enough to run it, plus it would rule out the pi-hole to router connection as a possible reason for the unstable network.
