2w ago

Local DNS on Pihole

How are folks syncing local DNS records across multiple Piholes?

20 comments

I just run teleporter on my primary and manually upload that backup to my secondary. My blocklists and local DNS dont change much, so its not a big concern of mine.
Nebula-Sync and Orbital-Sync may be of interest to you. It seems like you want to automate the syncing.
- Thanks! I'll take a look at those!
Multiple Piholes?
- I have a "main" Pihole on a Raspberry Pi, and I set up another instance in a VM for secondary functions.
  
  Can you just point the second to the first?
  
  I have this same setup, current strategy is I have automation in my n8n where I can fill in a form and if submits the dns addition to both piholes via api. I am considering alternatives but has worked alright for now
Why do you have more than one? Is this for an enterprise-level situation?
- So the whole house doesn’t go down and/or need to be reconfigured to do an update
  
  Pfft... Redundancy... Over-rated. ;)
- I've found that if I set primary as pihole and secondary as, say 1.1.1.1. then, my android phone will pick either one seemingly randomly. So my local DNS doesn't work.
  My workaround was to do two pihole. I forget how I sync them though.
  
  I see. I set my router's DNSs to pihole for the first and then one of adguard's public IPs for the second.
- My dns config options always have at least two spots. Obviously, this means I need two piholes to fill them both up.
  More seriously, it has actually saved my network from going down a couple times already.
- Just a home lab for fun and experimenting.
I run unbound alongside pihole for extra privacy and I keep my unbound config in git. I have gitea set up to push out new unbound configs every time there’s a git push.
- That's a great idea! Thanks! I've got unbound running locally on one instance of Pihole, and I've got it in a LXC for the other instance. Using the configs to pull from git would make that much easier to sync.
There is an iOS/macOS app called “Pi-hole Remote” that can manage multiple PiHole instances at once. I use that because it will make changes on both instances at once for me.
Other than that, I log in to each device and copy paste.
- Thanks! I didn't even think about running a local app, but this may be a fun find to experiment with!
Pihole runs on dnsmasq right? Maybe you could create a cronjob to copy the underlying dnsmasq.conf to other Piholes
- Excellent suggestion! Thank you!

20 comments