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.
Rules:
-
Be civil.
-
No spam.
-
Posts are to be related to self-hosting.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or readme if you're providing a link.
-
Submission headline should match the article title.
-
No trolling.
-
Promotion posts require active participation, with an account that is at least 30 days old. F/LOSS without a paywall has exceptions, with requirements. See the rules link for details. Tags [CBH] or [AIP] are required, see the links in Rule 8 for details.
-
AI-related discussions and AI-involved promotional posts have additional requirements for tagging, as noted in Rule 7 and the AI & Promotional Post Expanded Rules post, and find example disclosures here.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
view the rest of the comments
Yeah but what you will eventually find, if reliability matters at all to you, is that the pihole isn't the best for this. For one, many run on an SD card, which isn't really stable long-term (I started here and had to fix it due to SD card corruption quite a few times). Second, you don't have a backup. DNS not running when your machines depend on it equals an immediate outage across ALL devices (as long as you have it configured at your router level, which you should be doing, right?).
Technitium (and others) solve this problem gracefully.
I started with pihole (ad blocking) and unbound (recursive DNS), and that was a pain to set up properly.
Moved do technitium (which offers all of these in one package) plus the ability to natively cluster a second instance (so you have a backup load balanced instance for this critical service)
The best part is that setting it up if you have an old laptop or desktop running docker is incredibly simple. I had two nodes up and running clustered in less than 15 minutes. Took less time than setting up one pihole.
If you don't have docker it may take more time, but that's the slippery slope of setting up a homelab and running services like this.
My Pi hole has been up and solid for about a decade now, so not sure “isn’t really stable long term” is landing
Thank you for the in-depth explanation, Technitium sounds really involved. I just plunked down a pi hole, turned it on, and it’s been working for years and years. I’ll keep this in mind though if I ever want to drive myself nuts with networking
Good for you, many don't have the same experience. Technitium is easier to set up in my experience, but you do you if it works for you. That's the benefit of having free choices.
Just to be clear, I'm not trying to sell you or anyone on technitium over pihole or pihole+unbound, they're all free and I don't work for them or anything. However, as someone that has gone through this journey with all of them, I'll never go back to pihole, especially with the features technitium has and the importance of DNS to my home lab plus the incredible ease of setup.
No backup with PiHole?
PiHole can run redundant if you want. Does Technitium do this differently? Or more easily?
Technitium does this incredibly easily. I fiddled with pihole and unbound for so long to get them to coexist properly, and pihole alone before that. The pihole part was easy although unreliable on a raspberry pi due to the sd card. It was better once I added an ssd to the pi, but it didn't have recursive DNS. Adding unbound and getting them configured properly and coexisting properly wasn't an easy task. Technitium has all of this in one package and was trivial to set up one or more clustered nodes. You don't need anything to ensure they both work together, the clustering feature does this incredibly easily. One goes down? No prob, I see a discord alert from uptime kuma letting me know. When it comes back up cluster mgmt syncs everything and they load balance again.
My current setup has an uptime of 210 days, and likely would be longer if it weren't for a power outage.
It really is so simple, I'd suggest everyone try it out. You can always change it back if you don't like it. And, like the pihole, you can load curated block lists.