Hello, Im trying to monitor & control my dns in my network. I like the idea & features of nextdns but all your traffic goes trough them right? I wanna host something simular. I currently have pi-hole installed but i feel like its not as advanced as something like nextdns. What service could i use for this?
Thanks for your time!
It’s not so absolute; your DNS provider could resolve domains to their own server’s IP and MITM your traffic. This is how some of those DNS based region bypass work — by re-routing your traffic through their server in a supported region.
AdGuard Home comes with a few more goodies vs. pihole. Last but not least, access control, DoT, DoH, custom DNS for selected clients and so on (you need a domain and a certificate for the DoT, DoH, though)
I guess first I'd ask is why are you looking for your own DNS server? You can use most any server and host it yourself, things like bind or unbound are out there and baked into a lot of the home-server / domain controller type distro.
When you talk about all your traffic going ng through them, all your traffic won't go through the DNS provider. The DNS is only turning the name to a number, so they would know perhaps the intent to go there but not the actual traffic. You could just be doing a nslookup for fun for all they know. Even hosting your own, whoever is the next in line from your server will get requests for anything your box doesn't have an answer for, so it really only adds a mask to say 'someone asked me to ask you for this address'. That being the case, what's your goal in running one?
Depending on provider and intended purpose… strictly speaking, a DNS server tells your computer that example.com resolves to 169.254.169.254 and nothing more.
However, for example, if your DNS provider adds ad blocking, they may choose to change ads.example.com from 169.254.169.254 to 127.0.0.1 thereby preventing any advertiser JavaScripts from being requested. This is fine and all, but you’d have no way to be automatically alerted if they changed it to 123.234.123.234 and serve their own blank scripts.
If for example your DNS provider provides region bypass for streaming providers, they could resolve streaming.example.com from 169.254.169.254 to a server in another country with address 123.234.123.234; and route your request through that in order to circumvent the region lock.
These are all fine and well, but if the provider was compromised and/or sold to malicious actor, they could resolve your-bank.website to a phishing site, and then MITM all the traffic just like the region lock bypass example.
So… in theory, it shouldn’t do anything more than resolving, but in practice, it may be hard to detect, and they could be doing more than just resolving.
I have been using Adguard Home in the cloud, limited by clients and using it only for DoH/TLS. Updates are made directly in the UI, it's really very light and practical.