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?
I’d personally recommend AdGuard Home over PiHole, as it supports DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS out-of-the-box.
Honestly, if I was doing this, I’d probably run it on a VPS or my home server. I’d run at least two instances and configure their router to use them. You’d lose encrypted DNS, but it means they don’t need a device on their local network.
Someone will have to do maintenance eventually. 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.
Auto-upgrades are scary since there can be breaking changes between versions.
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.
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.
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.
I run pihole dockerized on Armbian for Rock64, those should be available.