A PiHole functions has a full DNS server. You can configure it to serve any arbitrary records you like - which is basically how it overrides ad domains to prevent them from loading.

So, if you know the IP address that a particular domain is supposed to route to, you configure the PiHole to respond with that IP address for that domain. So, it doesn't matter that the major DNS servers return junk because your PiHole never asks them.
- Pihole is great. Easy to setup. Runs on $80 worth of hardware on a raspberry...
  
  $80? I run mine on a Pi Zero that I got for $9 with a $6 wired network adapter for a grand total of $15. No problems for a household of five with one of us (me) being an extremely heavy user.
  
  Or if you have a NAS, just use that. There's nothing special about the Raspberry Pi hardware here.
  
  I used to do that, but it comes with the problem of your DNS going down any time you want to restart or do a hardware swap on your NAS. Or since it was running in docker something as simple as reloading docker would knock out the internet for a few minutes. It's worth the $15 to have them operate separately.
  
  Doesn't that just move the problem to the $15 device? Or are you saying you reboot your NAS significantly more often than your RPi? I have a RetroPie setup that I reboot about as often as my NAS, which is when I remember to run updates.
  
  I pretty much never reboot the Pi. It currently has over 18 months of uptime on it. My NAS on the other hand I probably restart for one reason or another maybe once every 6 months. So yeah I'd say I reboot it minimum 3x more often.
  
  Plus a reboot takes much longer on my NAS than on the Pi. The server board is slow to start, the SAS cards are slow to start, and unRAID is slow to start. Then I need to manually enter the password for disk encryption. Then wait for the array to start up. Then wait a bit more for the docker containers to start. Add all of that up and even the absolute fastest reboot is like 10 minutes while the Pi probably takes 30 seconds.
  
  And what if I want to swap hard drives? Now it's down for an hour. I guess I could wait until 3am to do all my upgrades so everyone is asleep, but I'd rather not. I suppose if it were just for myself it would matter a lot less. But again, it's only $15 to not have to think about it at all.
  
  Interesting. Boot times aren't an issue at all for me on my NAS because it's running on an old desktop processor and has plenty of performance. Both boot in <30s, and I leave them both on 24/7.
  
  I tend to upgrade all my servers around the same time (RPi, NAS, VPS), and my laptop and desktop get updates about every week or two. I don't like leaving systems unpatched, so I stay on top of it. I haven't needed to swap HDDs in the 6-ish years I've had my NAS configured, so I guess it's not an issue I've run into. I'd probably just schedule it when I do a router firmware update (I run a Mikrotik router), which I do every few months as well, since that way everyone expects a little downtime.
  
  Definitely. Though I’ll add that I ran PiHole + PiVPN on a Zero W ($10) for years. I upgraded it to a Pi Zero W 2 ($15 with extra cores) but I found that it had terrible packet drops, so I had to add a $15 usb wired adapter to it. I can max my upload speeds over vpn and dns is super low latency.
- Any good lists? Because pihole defaults to the aforementioned servers.
  
  Pretty decent article here
  
  https://avoidthehack.com/best-pihole-blocklists
  
  And there is https://filterlists.com/ which is a searchable index of lists. If you use uBlockOrigin you can add lists directly from fliterlists.com otherwise it provides links to Github etc.

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