So on my recent attempt to get more bandwidth going, Pihole decided to start throwing errors, so I uninstalled it and attempted to re-install it. Unfortunately, every install failed for one reason or another. It’s like it got super brittle over the last year. I spent two weeks trying to get it to work, but in a lot cases, it wouldn’t even launch after installation,. So I decide to pivot to a new DNS Server that has built-in “Recursive-DNS” (aka “black-holing”), unlike Pihole that doesn’t support it natively. Installing “unbound” was never a problem with Pihole, but for it to be built-in is a super nice reason to switch over.
It also provides a lot more options for me to customize my homelab networking, and I’m taking full advantage of them: mostly that it supports DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) and DNS-over-TLS (DoT), and Self-Hosting so it can act as a public nameserver. Supports conditional forwarding, zone delegation, and granular record control.
This is one of my best and easiest decisions in a long time.