Lowest maintenance pihole ever?

A few of my friends experienced the glory of PiHole in my home network and asked, if I could install such a thing in their networks as well.

Which I obviously could, but none of them are interested in updating/maintaining such a device. So I would like to collect some suggestions on how to deploy such a box with (ideally) zero interaction from my side until the end of times.

My hardware platform of choice would be a cheap thin client (Futro s920 or something like that) running Ubuntu with unattended updates enabled.

Pihole itself seem to offer an auto-updater, but I'm not sure how stable that runs in the long run - maybe Docker would be better suited here?

alien,
@alien@lemmy.my.id avatar

How about to set up a device that works locally at your friends’ house as DNS server, but don’t forget to install something like zerotier, so you can access it without setting up a port forward. With that, you can help them with the maintenance of their DNS server.

NewDataEngineer,

I would go a step further and use ansible to manage the devices. Set it up to auto update and you’ll have basically no maintenance.

gobbling871,

This is the correct answer. Takes a little bit of tinkering to setup but it’s free and works. Just make sure to change the default DNS endpoints from Cloudflare and Google to something more private.

dan, (edited )
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Configure SSH securely (Ed25519 key, password authentication disabled), and SSH in and update it once per month? Charge them a small fee, or do it for free in exchange for them doing something nice for you.

I'd personally recommend AdGuard Home over PiHole, as it supports DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS out-of-the-box.

My hardware platform of choice would be a cheap thin client

Why not a Raspberry Pi? The supply chain issues are clearing up.

You may want two so that there's redundancy and they don't lose DNS in case one dies. You can use something like https://github.com/bakito/adguardhome-sync (or the PiHole equivalent) to keep configs in sync across both.

dudeami0,
@dudeami0@lemmy.dudeami.win avatar

Why not a Raspberry Pi? The supply chain issues are clearing up.

In the US it seems the supply chain issues are alive as ever. Most of the official resellers are sold out on anything but the Pico and Zero boards. Some do have 4B boards for sale if you buy their starter kit with them, increasing the price by $65 on canakit. The supply issues are definitely not resolved for home users no matter what the CEO wants to say.

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Ah, interesting. Thanks for the info. I had heard that the supply chain issues were clearing up, but admittedly haven't checked the stock levels myself.

You can get something similar, like an ODROID.

ahoyboyhoy,

I run pihole dockerized on Armbian for Rock64, those should be available.

breadsmasher,
@breadsmasher@lemmy.world avatar

You could charge a small maintenance contract to keep it up to date!

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