Public Pihole server

topic sounds kinda dirty…anyways

I had the idea of creating a public Pi-hole server for friends and family to use on their ISP routers. Trying to avoid installing a raspberry pi at their house.

I’m thinking of closing all the ports on it except 53 and making it a part of my zero tier network so that I can manage it and add new blocklists and allow what they need.

Does anyone see any issues with this? other than the fact that I would be able to see DNS traffic from people…not that I really care I don’t want to snoop on people or capture traffic.

It will slow down their DNS quite a bit due to the extra layers.

yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaa? that much?

that was literally the answer i was hoping notttttttt to see haha

You would be adding a lot of latency with all those layers.

dammm okay i will take your advice…thanks

As Tom said, it will be rather slow. Of course, you can do the tests as proof of concept if it is very slow you just won’t implement it.
You can do dns tests based on https://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm to get a preview of the situation.

At current sbc prices and their size, if you only have a budget, simply implement pihole on sbc for each user locally in lan. Maybe something like NanoPi NEO …
https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=132

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wow never saw that one before smallest i used was the raspberry pi zero. I might to a proof of concept and check it out. Thinking digital ocean or aws since those are who I am familiar with. Leaning more towards digital ocean since they have a NYC data center and NY is where most family and friends live.

ill check it out and report back.

Not to mention alot of providers are frowning upon this. To make it work seamlessly you’d have to open UDP port 53 on your NAT/Firewall, which would inevitably get scanned by your ISP and others. Nothing but negative results from this.

I have PiHole here on a regular Pi. Not often, but sometimes, it bogs down on the home network alone. It’s caused enough issues for me to have to turn it off on some of our devices. Apparently, some in my household like seeing all the cruddy ads on websites. :thinking:

I spun up a server in Digital Ocean and loaded it with OpenVPN and Pi-Hole. Works well, but I only use it for my phone when I’m mobile, and sometimes my laptop if I bring it with me.

I built it only for me because I don’t like being “out there” without a Pi-hole protecting me. I run a Pi-hole at home and at work as well and those are what I am on 99% of the time.

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i think i am on my digital ocean vpn more than LTE these days… @SandboxGeneral

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How does that work and what does it cost? Sounds like a good idea. Obviously I don’t do that now.

How much it costs really depends on your usage. For me, it’s rather minimal and only a few dollars per month.

Here is the guide I used to get mine setup.

https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/vpn/overview/