So I’ve been a pihole user for a long long time…but seeing the advancements in AdGuard Home and some of the nicer UI facets, I was interested in giving it a try. I also have an active directory domain that I need to manage as well.
So, prior to recently, I had routed all DNS requests thought the AD DCs, and their upstream resolver was PiHole, and then Pihole routed to its internal install of cloudflared with DNS over HTTPS to the cloudflare DNS services.
More recently, I changed my DNS services in DNS to point directly to pihole, managed my local dns records in pihole and then used conditional forwarding to my AD DCs for local DNS resolution. The biggest benefit I saw in this adjustment is that I can identify what hosts are making what requests.
More recently than that, I brought Adguard Home into the environment and am using it as a secondary DNS server. I ended up taking it out of the mix for the moment. My thought process was having one DNS server on each of my active VM hosts just in case…but managing internal DNS records in adguard home is a bit of a pain in the ass, and there is no way to import in bulk.
So, the questions, 1) do you just use one or the other… pihole, vs adguard home… 2) do you use multiple dns servers or just a single one upstream…3) whats your preferred method of internal dns management in conjunction w/ pihole/adguard home?
I stopped using pihole years ago because it didn’t support wildcards. Technitium DNS server is fantastic. The dev is super responsive and keeps things updated.
This guy DNSes.
I think that was the longest feature list I have ever seen! 😁This looks more complete then any of the other popular ones. Do you agree?
Another vote for Technitium DNS. I used PiHole then Adguard Home and Technitium is much better for me. I actually run two of them so I never have more than one down outside of power outages. One on my Pi and one on my server that runs my Docker containers for my other services.
I do the same, just waiting for that cluster feature to come out!
Check this out. I’ve been using it with 3 nodes for years and it works perfectly.
https://github.com/TechnitiumSoftware/DnsServer/issues/231#issuecomment-783114395
Yep, that’s how I’m doing mine too, just the full sync would be nice. If I need to temporarily disable ad blocking for example, currently I have to login to both. It’s the best dns tool I’ve used though, after PiHole for years and then Adguard for a short period until I found this.
My biggest issue with pihole is that you can’t really sync between multiple servers natively. Does technetium support this?
I know others pointed to it a way to partly do this, but I wanted to just say that I don’t replicate mine on purpose at this point. The one running on my Pi updates automatically and the other one does not. That allows me to test new releases on one DNS without borking my whole setup. Then I update the other manually once I know the Pi is working fine.