I should clarify I wasn’t a upper level sys admin managing those servers, I just used them or maintained accounts being a rank and file technician
While I get the fundamental concept of DNS as a phonebook for your IPs. I am not sure why it is joked around if something goes haywire or someone breaks something.
Is it because if you get no DNS, people can’t log in through their AD accounts, browse the Internet?
Afaik DNS is a bit of a rabbit hole topic, maybe that’s why people joke about it due to DNS being this “No one really knows how this magic name matching box works”?
Please correct me, I’d genuinely like to know why this is prevalent from you guys.
The actual answer is a hosts list file that Unbound is augmenting within PiHole as a daemon. The entire core function of PiHole is leveraging Unbound. Without it, PiHole remains a useless GUI and minimal linux OS.
In fact, you can completely ditch PiHole, if you know what you’re doing, and simply run Unbound as a daemon in a minimal container and do exactly what PiHole does, or run it bare-metal on your own hardware instead of buying their overpriced devices.
I think I can spare the 55mb of ram my pihole container takes up
It’s crazy to read that when my Unbound has a 1.6 million host size block-list with regex filtered domains and uses at less than half that amount of RAM.
I’ll keep that in mind for the next time I need to run a DNS server on a Pentium II system
Or you can leverage that extra RAM to generate more of that weird AI furry porn you enjoy so much.
I tried that but it doesn’t run very well on the Pentium II
So happy to see someone explaining this because it’s always driven me crazy the amount of people pushing PiHole when you can do it so much more simply.
Is Pihole not the simpler way, since it configures Unbound for you?
Yes it’s simple but not the simplest way.
Does this block the ads itself or do I need additional configs?
PiHole blocks ad by using Unbound. Additional configs for what?
Like, when I install uBlock it comes with everything it needs. If I run Unbound does it block ads out of the box or do I need to point it to some list?
Unbound is a high-level DNS server. It needs you to provide it hosts in a list or provide it with regex scripts (for dynamic and more efficient blocking). It can block ads at the DNS level just like PiHole (because that’s literally what PiHole and AdGuard use under the hood, but add their fancy GUIs)
I would avoid it unless you know what you’re doing, and recommend reading the docs on their website and testing/breaking it within a Docker container.
It’s the difference between buying a car from a dealership (PiHole, AdGuard, etc) or building your own from scratch (Unbound). One is very limited, whereas building it and running it yourself you get to do way more than what’s spoon fed to you.
Ah okay. Unbound is arch, pi hole is Ubuntu. I have gripes with pi hole but it’s never not worked for me. I might just do that instead (if I ever get around to it lmao)
More like: Unbound = Gentoo, PiHole = Arch, AdGuard = Ubuntu