Well, what can I say: I set up a Raspberry Pi and installed Pi-hole on it. The idea is simple enough: less advertising and tracking on the home network – and when everything runs smoothly, the whole network feels a bit more tidy.
Yesterday evening I went a step further and activated Pi-hole as a DNS server. In theory that means: all devices ask the Pi where they need to go on the internet, and Pi-hole can block known advertising and tracking addresses right there. In practice though, I fairly quickly got the feeling that things weren't running particularly stably for me.
During the evening, RTL+ and Netflix suddenly went offline on the Apple TV – or at least they logged out, as if something had gone wrong in the background. It doesn't necessarily have to have been Pi-hole, but the timing matched up perfectly, which made it the obvious suspect.
Then there was a second sign that made me pause: Apple updates running in the evening took unusually long. Again: it could be coincidence, could be the line – but when you've just been tinkering with DNS and everything suddenly feels sluggish, you automatically look at the new component first.
Today, when I got home, the Raspberry Pi was no longer reachable over Wi-Fi. That's exactly the kind of problem you can't afford in everyday life: when the DNS server disappears, all your devices are potentially left hanging or at least behaving oddly.
So I've now connected the Pi via LAN cable for the time being. I want to observe whether it stays reliably reachable that way. Cable isn't always the most elegant solution, but it's often the most reliable – especially when you're trying to figure out whether the problem lies with Wi-Fi or with the configuration.
If things work well over LAN, I might make the Pi the DNS server again. For now though, everything is reset, simply to bring some calm back to the network. My conclusion after the first few hours: Pi-hole is fascinating, but the step to making it the central DNS server really needs to run rock-solidly – otherwise you'll notice every little wobble exactly where you least want to.
