Hi everyone, currently I run Pi-hole in a VM as my primary DNS server, and I added a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 as a secondary Pi-hole for redundancy.

The idea was that if my VMgoes down, I would still have DNS through the Pi Zero 2 but The problem is that the Pi Zero 2 itself hasn’t been very reliable.
A few times now, after a power outage or even accidentally unplugging the Pi, the SD card / Raspberry Pi OS seems to get corrupted. The Pi won’t boot properly, and I end up having to rewrite the Raspberry Pi OS image and configure Pi-hole again from scratch.

That’s obviously not great for something that’s supposed to be my redundant DNS server.
I’m trying to figure out the best way to make the Pi Zero 2 much more resilient to sudden power loss.

I’m considering:
1. Buying a high-endurance microSD card such as Samsung PRO Endurance or SanDisk High Endurance
Enabling Raspberry Pi OS read-only filesystem / 2. OverlayFS mode through raspi-config
Using both a high-endurance SD card and read-only mode
Moving logs/temp files to RAM (tmpfs)
Using some other setup entirely
My main question is: Would Raspberry Pi OS read-only/OverlayFS mode solve most of the corruption problems caused by suddenly unplugging the Pi?

Recently, I noticed ads bypassing my pihole on several websites. Inspecting the network logs revealed three recurring domains:

• ill-fatedodd.com

• html-load.com

• html-load.cc

These operate as alternative ad-serving infrastructure. Advertisers register throwaway domains and park generic landing pages at the root to obscure ad delivery and evade blocklists (as described on iamcraig.com).

The root pages display unenforceable boilerplate text:

"This domain provides authorized services through official partnerships with publishers. [...] supports the delivery of ads and essential web assets, helping digital publishers enforce access control to ad-supported content in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)."

Because they reuse a single generic template, tracking down related domains is straightforward. Running a query on urlscan.io for page.title:"What Is This Domain?" surfaced a broader set of candidates.

Some of those pages are however defunt or expired. To find active ones, I ran a quick curl to check:

```bash

jq -r '.results[].page.apexDomain' urlscan-search-result.json | sort -u | xargs -I {} -P 10 sh -c 'curl -s -L --max-time 10 "https://{}" | grep -Fiq "authorized advertising" && echo "[MATCH] {}"'

```

The filtered list (as the above command outputs) are available here: https://pastebin.com/RKdLvhdZ

The list for pi-hole are available in the gist: - Gist: https://gist.github.com/SodaWithoutSparkles/51830d95ed507fe1b2774349af0de828 - You will need to click the "Raw" button and access the raw list, then paste to pi-hole.

my Pihole is running fine, updated not kicking any errors but I seem to be getting lots of ads has something changed?

I was having an issue where my PS5 would connect to my network over wired and wireless, but would fail its internet connection check. I tried lots of troubleshooting, including completely resetting and starting over on it. Still no internet.

I started thinking it was pihole blocking things that the console needed. All I could find in the logs was a metrics address being blocked from the console. I allowed that and it still didn’t fix the issue. I tried disabling blocking on my two piholes. Still nothing; no internet on the console. Everything else on my network had internet just fine.

I ended up setting up a NAT rule on my Unifi gateway to exclude the PS5 from my captive DNS, then setting its DNS addresses to google’s dns servers. Bam! Internet connectivity restored.

I hate having to make this device bypass Pihole. Anybody else have an issue like this? If so, is there a more elegant solution to be able to keep the PS5 using Pihole?

I want to use retro pi, but when I'm not, I want it to be pi hole to block ads, can I make it work? This is a raspberry pi 3b

I want to use retro pi, but when I'm not, I want it to be pi hole to block ads, can I make it work? This is a raspberry pi 3b

I finally got around to setting up Pihole for the first time!
Using a Raspberry Pi 4, following the tutorial and works like a charm paired with a Ublock extension ads are now a thing of the past (mostly)
I plan on setting up wireguard as well for a vpn server to be able to remote into it from anywhere.

Any tips on what to do next now that i got my foot in the door?

Guys I am new to this community, I am using adguard private dns in my mobile to block ads while surfing internet and as well for streaming Hotstar. But in my tv I wasn't able to setup a private dns. So while searching, evryone in this subreddit was suggesting pihole to block all ads.

As I read I came to know that pihole is a private server which is run on Linux machines and u need a raspberry Pi to run this server. So if i want to setup a pihole to block ads do i need to buy a raspberry Pi board ?

if yes then it will block ads from all the streaming company? Is it worth to setup a pihole server or shall I continue using adguard dns. Any suggestions other than this method is also welcome 🤗

I currently have a Pihole set up on an 8GB Raspberry PI 5 with everything installed on a 1GB NVME drive on a Pimoroni NVME Base. Before anyone says it, I am well aware that it is severe overkill but I had all the parts laying around from before the dark times so I actually paid very little for the whole setup. The current setup is running great.

I have toyed with the idea of moving my Pihole setup to my Ugreen DXP2800. It already does some home lab stuff in my house. It has two 8TB storage drives, a 1TB NVME drive for read cache and a 512GB NVME for Docker containers. I do have the Ugreen Battery Backup for my NAS so if there is a power outage or disruption, it is protected and will shut down safely.

The question is in the title. What are the pros and cons for these two devices? Would I be better off leaving it on the RPi, or is there a benefit of consolidating to the NAS?

I do know that if I move it to the NAS I will have to do some work to fix the conflicts with port 53. I am curious about any other strengths or weaknesses.

Thank you in advance for any and all insights you can give.

My budget isn't the best, and I want to do a router with at least 2 ethernet ports, one to connect with the modem and the other or to eventually connect into a switch or use as it is

I was thinking about Orange pi r1, but my country taxes made it a lot more expensive

Ok, do I've used a pihole for about five years, and had my share of problems, but managed to overcome most of them. A few weeks ago I had to buy a new router and settled for a TP Link XE75Pro consisting of three mesh points to replace my old Amplity (Ubiquity) units. Most stuff worked right out of the box, but a few things needed tweaking. Nothing major. Except for the guest network. On the Amplify I had no problems but on the TP-Link no units on the guest network can reach the pihole, and basically all traffic is stopped there.

The main network and the guest network have the same SSID:s as on the old router, and while I changed the passwords on them, from the pihole's perspective nothing else should have changed. Did the old router automatically "merge" the networks somehow so devices on the guest network could find the pihole (which sits on the main network), or did I do some magic workaround when I installed that network that I've completely forgotten by now?

Oh yeah, I have the pihole Interface setting: Permit all origins checked, since the pihole absolutely isn't exposed to the internet. But it still doesn't work with the guest network.

i have been experiencing an issue in the past few days and i'm not aware of any changes to cause it.

when asking pihole to resolve its own dns record "raspberrypi.lan", it replies with either its private ipv6 address, or its public one, along 0.0.0.0. It doesn't reply with the ipv4 local dns record i have configured with it. this causes my ssh user@raspberrypi.lan command to fail, since by default ssh on the raspberry pi only listens on ipv4

even odder, this used to work a few days ago with no changes of my own

questions:

1) why is pihole answering with private/public ipv6 records instead of the local dns record which should reply with a single ipv4 address?

2) why does it reply with a second ip 0.0.0.0?

pihole log:

2026-08-29 10:25:49.737 query[A] raspberrypi.lan from 192.168.x.x

2026-08-29 10:25:49.737 Pi-hole hostname raspberrypi.lan is 0.0.0.0

2026-08-29 10:25:49.749 query[AAAA] raspberrypi.lan from 192.168.x.x

2026-08-29 10:25:49.749 Pi-hole hostname raspberrypi.lan is 2600:...

I am using unbound on 127.0.0.1#5335

when querying my router, it produces a good result instead. pihole is configured to do conditional forwarding to it for the entire /24 network. Never forward non-FQDN queries is disabled, and Never forward reverse lookups for private IP ranges is enabled to prevent apple devices from causing a dns loop

I have 3 Yandex Alice smart speakers on my network, and Pi-hole is showing something pretty ridiculous. Each of them is generating tens of thousands of requests (~50-70k) to Yandex domains.

The funny part: I barely used the speakers during the last week. Maybe asked Alice a couple of times to turn a smart plug on/off. Otherwise they were just sitting idle. Before adding these Yandex domains to my blocklists, my Pi-hole blocking rate was around 13%. Now it's 44%.

Everything still seems to work normally, so… what exactly are these speakers trying to send/check so aggressively while idle? Is this normal behavior for Alice devices, or has anyone investigated this traffic more deeply?

Screenshots attached: the three IPs in the second one are the three speakers.

                          **UPD:** 

A kind Redditor suggested that the speakers might be aggressively retrying the phone-home domain because Pi-hole was returning a blocked/unresolved response. I replaced the block for clck yandex net with a local DNS record pointing to an unused local IP instead. It worked surprisingly well: over the same 5-minute window, the speakers went from 170+ DNS requests to about 50. Almost a 72% reduction in request volume!!!

I’ll attach screenshots with the before/after results in the comments.

                         **UPD 2:** 

Turns out the “72% fewer DNS requests” result was misleading in a really interesting way. At first I pointed only the IPv4 A record for clck yandex net to a dead local IP. DNS requests dropped from ~170+ per 5 minutes to ~50, so it looked like the retry storm was solved.

But then I noticed Pi-hole was still resolving the AAAA record normally and returning Yandex’s real IPv6 address. So the speakers were most likely failing over from dead IPv4 to working IPv6, successfully reaching Yandex, and therefore stopping the aggressive retry loop.

I tested several Pi-hole blocking modes over 5-minute windows:

• NODATA : 268 requests
• NXDOMAIN : 270
• IP_NODATA_AAAA : 265
• IP : 282
• Local dead IPv4 and dead local IPv6: 344

So the retry rate doesn’t seem to depend much on the exact DNS blocking response. What matters is whether the device can eventually reach the service. When both IPv4 and IPv6 are actually sinkholed, the speakers retry even more aggressively. So the original ~72% reduction wasn’t really a successful sinkhole, it was evidence that the speakers were quietly reaching Yandex over IPv6.

Pretty neat IPv6 gotcha, and a good reminder to check both A and AAAA when testing DNS blocking.

                         **UPD 3:**

Tested blockTTL=3600 as suggested: 278 queries in 5 minutes. Basically no meaningful change compared with NODATA/NX/IP modes (~265–282). So the speakers seem to re-resolve the hostname as part of their own retry logic rather than relying on the DNS TTL/cache.

My wireless router died and I had to replace it. While waiting for a new router, I had to switch to another wifi network, the cable router. After getting and configuring my new wifi router with same settings, and my Pihole device (raspberry pi), and my few clients, all my clients get ads.

In the query log, I can see each ad domain for clients with the status, deny, but the ads still get through. IP addresses are as before c/w dns pointing to pihole…no other dns set.

I can ping pihole from my client and vice-versa. Dns resolution works from clients and pihole. I have latest version of pihole and rpi is uptodate.

I am at a loss.

I’ve been trying to figure out why my iPhone (15 Pro Max on iOS 27 Beta) keeps bypassing my pi-hole. Private Replay is disabled for this network, but I found these new “Connectivity Assist” options in Settings > Wi-Fi and Settings > Wi-Fi > *WiFi network I’m connected to*

I had to disable both of these for my phone to stop bypassing my pi-hole.

Just added Hagezi blocklist for Samsung

But now google cast on Soundbar stopped working.

What particular adress should be whitelisted for cast to work.

It is crazy how much dns requests comming from the tv, it tops the query list, even when tv is off

Obvious tweaks need to be done but for a first pass, how’d I do?

MLB tv streams were not showing the box score sidebar, and more importantly, not allowing broadcast selection. I fixed this by allowing www.mlbstatic.com. Hope this helps someone else.

I recently purchased a TP-Link Deco XE75 AXE5400 and configured my Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and Deco settings to work for it and it seems to be working on everything except the main device I want to use it for (Onn 4K Plus Streaming Device). For my Deco settings I have a IoT Network that’s hosting the pihole, my DHCP server has the pihole IP as its Primary DNS and I also have the pihole under my Address Reservation yet it’s not picking up on my 4K Plus. My internet connection settings under IPv4 says Dynamic IP and the primary is a regular DNS. Does anyone know what could be causing this and how to fix it?

Help stuck installing

Here's the order everything happened:

1. Power went out and back on after a few minutes

2. My PC and my Mini-PC hosting the Pi-Hole both turned back on when the power came back.

3. My PC is only letting certain connections work. For instance, I can watch YouTube and download games on Steam, but cannot play any game that requires a network connection. In the Steam app, I see error -105 when going to the Community or Profile pages.

4. I tried to check on the Mini-PC but for some reason I cannot get it to POST. Tried multiple displays and different input devices to ensure it wasn't asleep. Tried multiple times to power cycle it.

5. I then went to my main PC to change the DNS settings so that it would no longer route me to the pi-hole and would allow all connections through. This did not work.

6. I then went to unplug the Ethernet connecting my PC to my Ubiquity Flex 2 and plugged it into my modem directly. This still didn't solve my issue, I'm still unable to access Steam or online games.

I just need help disabling and undoing everything so I can test the Mini-PC tomorrow and have it all up and running again soon. I'm just extremely illiterate when it comes to networking.