Can I run Pi-Hole on my Z-Net?

[S-F]

I'm not sure what to say that isn't covered in the title of the thread. Does anyone have any experience or thoughts on the matter?

[rmasonjr]

I do have a Z-Net and a Pi-Hole. The Z-Net is still running bone stock as a Raspberry Pi Model B+. My Pi-Hole is a Pi3.

Personally, I wouldnt risk slowing down my lighting control for DNS, or vice-versa. The Pis are so cheap power efficient, you might be better off having them separated.

[Kerat]

Can I run Pi-Hole on my Z-Net?

I would say that it depends on how loaded your z-net is. I would run HTOP to get a better idea of system resource utilization.

Here I run PFSense as my home firewall. I have a local DNS server hosted on PFSense. Also, I have been running PFBlockerNG for some time on the recommendation of @Pete.

In PFBlockerNG you can block by world region, which I did for a while. I kept finding destinations and sources that would get blocked and have to be white listed. What's more there are enough domestic sources of malicious attack that I would end up missing. I opted to take a different approach. PFBlocker supports custom IPv4 IPv6 and DNSBL lists.

Custom IPv4/IPv6 lists allow me to policy out IP communication to and from my firewall. I added a handful of black lists I trust there and opted to block communication to and from them.

DNSBL allows you to filter DNS requests with a black list. I added the feeds that Pi-holes uses here as well as a few other reputable ones I have used in the past.

So this gives me the same feature set using as Pi-hole in my existing PFSense firewall.


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[Pete]

Here is an example way to show utilization of different stuff on your ZNet.

Here using an RPi2 running a few things including ZWave.

It is running ser2net, OWFS, Digitemp and Domoticz. Initially I wanted to look at the chit chat on the network.

I type sudo lsof -i -P -n | grep LISTEN

[ATTACH]62972[/ATTACH]

Then install htop

sudo apt-get install htop

Watch it and use the filter to separate out application use:

Here is ser2net viewing with htop

[ATTACH]62973[/ATTACH]

Here is owfs utilization:

[ATTACH]62974[/ATTACH]

Here is Domoticz utilization: (Domoticz is a LUA based automation program).

[ATTACH]62975[/ATTACH]