Pi Hole and Home Automation

Irish Gunner

Looking at setting up pi hole at home. However wondering if it would have any affect for home automation. I have hue, alexa and kasa plugs on the network along with Nvidia shield.

Was thinking of setting it up to disable adds but just wondering how other devices will respond.

Anyone?

wallaby72

Irish Gunner wrote: »

Looking at setting up pi hole at home. However wondering if it would have any affect for home automation. I have hue, alexa and kasa plugs on the network along with Nvidia shield.

Was thinking of setting it up to disable adds but just wondering how other devices will respond.

Anyone?

Hi
I have all those HA devices on my home network and have used pi hole for the last few months without any issues.

Irish Gunner

wallaby72 wrote: »

Hi
I have all those HA devices on my home network and have used pi hole for the last few months without any issues.

Just reading up on it and for a novice like me is it easy enough to set up? Also pi stays plugged into router as I've bridged mine.

Also if pi does it still have 2.4 and 5ghz.

Maybe move post to computer forum

The high horse brigade

I have Pihole running in a docker container on my server for over a year with home assistant and lots of home automation devices without issue. Anyway, it's easy to whitelist domains. I had to whitelist a Nvidia domain for Nvidia GeforceNow

thecivvie

Total novice to the whole HA and PiHole myself and have both running on 2 Pi's with no issues. I found PiHole almost boring to setup as it was so easy.

I have a server arriving and may vm them both as I find the HA pi is always burdened. I have a lot of automation

The high horse brigade

thecivvie wrote: »

Total novice to the whole HA and PiHole myself and have both running on 2 Pi's with no issues. I found PiHole almost boring to setup as it was so easy.

I have a server arriving and may vm them both as I find the HA pi is always burdened. I have a lot of automation

I have both running in docker on a CentOS host on a low power HP Proliant Microserver. Definitely use docker, I'm a huge docker fan. It makes it so clean and easy to upgrade when the container is disposable, to upgrade the software you just delete the container pull the latest image and start it. It's also OS neutral should you ever need to move the containers to another host

Irish Gunner

The high horse brigade wrote: »

I have both running in docker on a CentOS host on a low power HP Proliant Microserver. Definitely use docker, I'm a huge docker fan. It makes it so clean and easy to upgrade when the container is disposable, to upgrade the software you just delete the container pull the latest image and start it. It's also OS neutral should you ever need to move the containers to another host

Ok seems to be a bit above my pay grade. Will get pi, memory card, case and power cable and start from there.

Thanks

xckjoo

Irish Gunner wrote: »

Ok seems to be a bit above my pay grade. Will get pi, memory card, case and power cable and start from there.

Thanks

Thinking of doing this myself so thanks for this thread
If you're just using this pi for a pihole you don't need to get bogged down in docker images and home automation installs. Just follow one of the basic guides for installing pihole on an rpi. You can always repurpose the rpi if you need to.

Irish Gunner

Okay would the below be okay for starters don't want to clog up forum with unrelated HA posts

UCreate Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ Desktop Starter Kit (16Gb, Black) https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07BNPZVR7/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_xWpjCbY44SXPZ

The high horse brigade

Irish Gunner wrote: »

Okay would the below be okay for starters don't want to clog up forum with unrelated HA posts

UCreate Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ Desktop Starter Kit (16Gb, Black) https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07BNPZVR7/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_xWpjCbY44SXPZ

Yes or a kit like this is a good place to start
https://thepihut.com/collections/raspberry-pi-kits-and-bundles/products/raspberry-pi-3b-plus-starter-kit

Make sure the SD card is class 10, I don't see it mentioned but I've not read through the description fully

thecivvie

The high horse brigade wrote: »

I have both running in docker on a CentOS host on a low power HP Proliant Microserver. Definitely use docker, I'm a huge docker fan. It makes it so clean and easy to upgrade when the container is disposable, to upgrade the software you just delete the container pull the latest image and start it. It's also OS neutral should you ever need to move the containers to another host

I have been meaning to look into docker. I prefer openSuse so will have to investigate how to use it. Will try it when the Dell T110ii arrives

tech

thecivvie wrote: »

Total novice to the whole HA and PiHole myself and have both running on 2 Pi's with no issues. I found PiHole almost boring to setup as it was so easy.

I have a server arriving and may vm them both as I find the HA pi is always burdened. I have a lot of automation

Hi
sounds very interesting, what automation are you currently running

xckjoo

Rejigging my network setup today so might give this a go while I'm at it. I've already got home-assistant on an RPi and I'll try and add pihole to run beside it. Don't actually have any automations setup at the moment so I think I'll just wipe the SD card, install Raspbian (lite I guess to reduce overhead), install pihole and finally hass in a python virtual environment (as recommended in this thread). I'll report back :pac:

xckjoo

Found an issue because I'm using the Virgin Media Hub 3.0 as the router and can't set the dns server on it. Pihole has a workaround by using it as the dhcp server but the family started getting up so had to stop messing with the network for now

thecivvie

tech wrote: »

Hi
sounds very interesting, what automation are you currently running

Mainly with presence detection and turning lights on and off. Also have a moisture sensor that if activated, and I am home, the lights turn on and get a warning on Telegram. Outside lights turn on at sunset -30 and off at 1am. Adding to the turn off that if I am out, then they stay on

xckjoo

Quick update to say the DHCP server switch went fine. Disabled on the router, enabled on the pi-hole and then restarted the router. Devices that were already connected didn't change their IP address until they were restarted (i.e. IP address released and new one requested). Seems to all be working fine now and home-assistant is running fine in its python environment.

All in all Pi-Hole is extremely simple to setup and use. Home-assistant gave me a few extra headaches but nothing major. Still have to setup an MQTT broker but that might be for another day :pac:

The high horse brigade wrote: »

I have Pihole running in a docker container on my server for over a year with home assistant and lots of home automation devices without issue. Anyway, it's easy to whitelist domains. I had to whitelist a Nvidia domain for Nvidia GeforceNow

Can you remember what you had to whitelist and/or why? I gave a test run there and it seemed to be working fine. No worries if you can't, I can just keep an eye out for issues.

The high horse brigade

xckjoo wrote: »

Can you remember what you had to whitelist and/or why? I gave a test run there and it seemed to be working fine. No worries if you can't, I can just keep an eye out for issues.

I have Wally3ks bkocklists added which breaks lots, Facebook, Facebook messenger Instagram, Xbox live, Dropbox and a few others so I've whitelisted lots over the last few months. If one of the family complain I login on my phone and check what they've blocked in the last few minutes and whitelist it from the query log
https://firebog.net

Irish Gunner

Is it a case that when setting up that i have to whitelist some sites so that house can access them?

I'm picturing shouts from upstairs saying what's wrong with the WiFi i can't get into certain site?

Are they easy enough to add and are most popular already added when installing?

xckjoo

Irish Gunner wrote: »

Is it a case that when setting up that i have to whitelist some sites so that house can access them?

I'm picturing shouts from upstairs saying what's wrong with the WiFi i can't get into certain site?

Are they easy enough to add and are most popular already added when installing?

Potentially. You select which blocklists you want to use (they're maintained by various people/groups) and some of them are probably more severe on what they block than others. I haven't encountered any issues so far with about 24hr uptime and all the standard blocklists enabled. I don't think the Wally3k blocklist is included by default but could be wrong.
It's easy to add a domain to the whitelist though. On the Queries page you'll see a list of the sites that have been requested, if they were allowed through or blocked, and a button to add them to the Whitelist/Blacklist.

The high horse brigade

Irish Gunner wrote: »

Is it a case that when setting up that i have to whitelist some sites so that house can access them?

I'm picturing shouts from upstairs saying what's wrong with the WiFi i can't get into certain site?

Are they easy enough to add and are most popular already added when installing?

You'll have few problems with the default lists

Irish Gunner

Final question on this I hope as don't want it to go off topic and create a huge thread

I have a Virgin Hub but have this bridged to a TP Link Archer C9router so when changing any settings would this affect it or just simply log into TP Link router admin and do the necessary changes there?

The high horse brigade

Irish Gunner wrote: »

Final question on this I hope as don't want it to go off topic and create a huge thread

I have a Virgin Hub but have this bridged to a TP Link Archer C9router so when changing any settings would this affect it or just simply log into TP Link router admin and do the necessary changes there?

Yes, you need to change the TP Link DHCP server so it gives out the Pihole IP as first DNS server and the router IP as second (as backup on case your Pihole wasn't available) in the DHCP leases it's giving your devices.

Note, your changes are in DHCP, do not make any changes in DNS on the TP Link

On any device that you want to bypass Pihole just give it the router IP as static DNS

illdoit2morrow

Apologies for resurrecting an old thread but I'm hoping some one can help with my pi-hole set-up.

I've installed pi-hole on an old raspberry pi that was lying around.
Installation went fine, the pi has its own IP address and i have assigned it to the same IP address on my vodafone gigabox modem.
My issue is that when i change the DNS settings on the router, none of the devices on the network can access the internet. If i leave the DNS settings on the router as they are defaulted (i.e. automatic/no ) and change a device (i.e. my pc) to the the ip address of the pi, then the benefits of pi-hole can be seen on that device.

Any idea why making the change on the router doesn't work, but applying the DNS settings on a device does work?
I can't find anything on-line when it comes to the vodafone gigabox set-up with pi-hole.

xckjoo

illdoit2morrow wrote: »

Apologies for resurrecting an old thread but I'm hoping some one can help with my pi-hole set-up.

I've installed pi-hole on an old raspberry pi that was lying around.
Installation went fine, the pi has its own IP address and i have assigned it to the same IP address on my vodafone gigabox modem.
My issue is that when i change the DNS settings on the router, none of the devices on the network can access the internet. If i leave the DNS settings on the router as they are defaulted (i.e. automatic/no ) and change a device (i.e. my pc) to the the ip address of the pi, then the benefits of pi-hole can be seen on that device.

Any idea why making the change on the router doesn't work, but applying the DNS settings on a device does work?
I can't find anything on-line when it comes to the vodafone gigabox set-up with pi-hole.

It's almost definitely an issue with the DNS requests not being forwarded from the router to the pihole. Is the Vodafone router a rebranded version of a different brand? You might have better look searching under the original name.

Alternatively use the DHCP server set up for the PiHole. It works well and will probably save you a lot of headaches.
I recently changed providers and moved from DHCP to DNS server set up and have a few issues with it. Think I'll move back to the DHCP server set up at some stage but just haven't gotten around to it yet.

Spocker

illdoit2morrow wrote: »

My issue is that when i change the DNS settings on the router, none of the devices on the network can access the internet. If i leave the DNS settings on the router as they are defaulted (i.e. automatic/no ) and change a device (i.e. my pc) to the the ip address of the pi, then the benefits of pi-hole can be seen on that device.

What exactly did you change on the router (a picture will help) - what you trying to do is change the DNS server that is supplied with DHCP requests to your Pi Hole, correct?

I have the same setup as xckjoo, I use my PiHole for both DHCP and DNS and just use the Vodafone box as a modem

illdoit2morrow

Spocker wrote: »

What exactly did you change on the router (a picture will help) - what you trying to do is change the DNS server that is supplied with DHCP requests to your Pi Hole, correct?

I have the same setup as xckjoo, I use my PiHole for both DHCP and DNS and just use the Vodafone box as a modem

I changed the DNS setting as in the attached picture, 192.168.1.24 was the address of the pi running pi-hole. That particular setting didn't work for me, my desktop, phone, tablet were unable to open a webpage.

I have since turned off DHCP Server on the router and enabled it on the pi, i enabled DHCP server on the pi and added the ip address of the pi to the Static DHCP leases configuration. This seems to be working now.

I haven't made any dns setting (see second screen grab) changes within pi-hole, do i need to?

xckjoo

illdoit2morrow wrote: »

I changed the DNS setting as in the attached picture, 192.168.1.24 was the address of the pi running pi-hole. That particular setting didn't work for me, my desktop, phone, tablet were unable to open a webpage.

I have since turned off DHCP Server on the router and enabled it on the pi, i enabled DHCP server on the pi and added the ip address of the pi to the Static DHCP leases configuration. This seems to be working now.

I haven't made any dns setting (see second screen grab) changes within pi-hole, do i need to?

You're all done. That's the upstream DNS settings (the PiHole still needs a DNS server to determine the actual web addresses you're devices are requesting). The ad site addresses should already be blocked.



You can test it with this page: https://ads-blocker.com/testing/

slayer91

Hi,

Just came across this thread and the problem is very similar to my situation.

Vodafone Gigabit router, pihole setup on a PI3 with ethernet connection to switch.
PI hole as a static ip address. 192.168.1.33


My problem is that once I set the vodafone DNS setting to the pihole IP address as per attached image. I lose internet access for all my devices (Failure to resolve DNS)

I have disabled the DHCP on the vodafone route and enabled it on the pihole and all is good regards internet access but once I try to tell the vodafone router it should use the pi ip address for DNS, all internet access goes.

Any ideas?

Regards

Liam

Spocker

Turn off the DNS setting in the Vodafone router - if your devices are getting their DHCP addresses via PiHole, then they are also resolving DNS via PiHole, so theres no need for it on the router