I have an asus router with a pi-hole on the network.

I was doing some work on my server and noticed that when pi-hole was down, I couldn’t access the internet. I was looking for some ideas online how to deal with this, but they said to have a second pihole on the network in case one is offline. Is that the only way to do it? Is there any way to have the network go back to normal if the pihole is offline?

  • Bizarroland@kbin.social
    1·
    9 months ago

    If you’re router has a failover DNS option, usually listed as DNS 2, I would set something like quad 9 as your backup DNS. Address is 9.9.9.9.

    If you don’t want to do that, then having a second instance of pihole running as the secondary DNS is pretty much your only good option

    • Andi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      That’s not how the two entries for DNS works. Devices will use both rather randomly, and therefore some requests will not be filtered.

      The best way is to run two instances for redundancy.

      • Bizarroland@kbin.social
        1·
        9 months ago

        Can you send me some more information on this because this is the first I’ve ever heard that it would not automatically pick the fastest closest and most responsive DNS system available.

        No remote DNS server will ever be as fast as one that is local

        • Pete90@feddit.deEnglish
          2·
          9 months ago

          I tried this. Put a DNS override for Google.com for one but not the other Adguard instance. Then did a DNS lookup and the answer (ip) changed randomly form the correct one to the one I used for the override. I’m assuming the same goes for the scenario with the l public DNS as well. In any case, the response delay should be similar, since the local pi hole instance has to contact the upstream DNS server anyway.