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?
Spitballing ideas:
- Run PiHole on a public facing server/port. You’ll probably need to plan out the security aspects of it, but then your friends could then just set their devices to use the PiHole DNS (much like how people can set their devices to use 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8).
- Drop a Pi with PiHole in their network that is managed with some fleet/IOT management platform like Balena. That’ll in theory get you PiHole running in a container, and you’ll have a management platform to actually remotely connect to the Pi to manage it.
You may be already aware, but be mindful of the danger associated with having an ounce of responsibility for their DNS uptime. The bonus of option #1 is that you could also empower your friends to “bypass” PiHole should it go belly up.
